In a report on higher education released Tuesday, State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss sharply criticized the administrations of Israeli universities. In addition to mismanagement, he charged, they are engaged in financial obfuscation and active obstruction of regulatory efforts.
According to Lindenstrauss, the universities have been giving their employees salary benefits well beyond that 
Hebrew University, the Technion and Tel Aviv University are running at deficits of billions of shekels.
authorized by the Finance Ministry. Therefore, he continued, "after the universities paid their employees the unauthorized additional salary benefits, they were left with smaller amounts of money to use for their primary purpose - academic instruction and research."
This untenable situation has been left uncorrected by the schools and by the Higher Education Council since at least 1988, according to the Comptroller's report. Lindenstrauss' office had warned the universities against persisting in awarding the unauthorized salaries and benefits over the years, the report said, to no avail.
Obfuscation
Comptroller Lindenstrauss accused the universities of presenting false budget reports, which included positive balance sheets that concealed the academic institutions' true financial obligations to their employees. He said that all the universities were guilty of this behavior with the exception of Haifa University.
The deficits that the universities have been running up, Lindenstrauss wrote, are significant. Bar-Ilan, Ben-Gurion and Haifa universities, along with the Weizmann Institute, are each in the red by hundreds of millions of shekels. Hebrew University, the Technion and Tel Aviv University are running at deficits of billions of shekels per institution.
These dramatic deficits were noted by the accountants for the Higher Education Council, but the Council "failed to act as it was obligated to in its position and within its jurisdiction in order to cause the financial obligations to be presented properly," the Comptroller's report explained. This was a complete dereliction of "the duty the government assigned to it - the prevention of deficits in the universities."
Obstruction
Even more critically, Lindenstrauss claimed that the university administrations have been blocking oversight efforts necessary to relieve the resulting financial distress of their own institutions. "The universities are not allowing the assigned supervisor to monitor them. Through the University Presidents committee, they are making great efforts, with unbridled reference to the principle of academic freedom, to foil every effort by the supervisor to find a solution and bring them under authentic and effective oversight."
Lindenstrauss also charged the Finance Ministry with employing a double standard when it came to financial discipline in the nation's universities. The ministry "did not act vigorously and did not make use of all the tools at its disposal - unlike how it behaves towards other sectors - in order to establish oversight of the universities and handle the significant salary irregularities it has known about for years."
Furthermore, Lindenstrauss wrote that his efforts to obtain assistance from the university administrations while preparing his current report were utterly fruitless.
To rectify the situation, the Comptroller recommended that the Finance Ministry "consider conditioning the budget allocations to the universities on the withdrawal of their opposition to supervisory oversight."
University Presidents Committee Responds
The heads of the nation's universities responded to the Comptroller's report by saying they would make every effort to correct the failings it identifies. However, regarding claims that they were obstructing Lindenstrauss' office, the University Presidents Committee said, "The university presidents cooperated with the Comptroller's Office and provided him with all material that was necessary for carrying out the oversight - and so they were surprised at his reaction and reject his claim of any lack of cooperation whatsoever."
The budgetary issues identified by the Comptroller, the Committee said, are "long-term" and complicated, and they'll require government collaboration. However, the issue of government oversight, the university presidents said, is a matter of "differing interpretations".
