Inappropriate Travel Spending

pops

Has anyone read this article in the Galway Advertiser? Apparently something similar was run in the Irish Indo this week.

What it doesn't say was that the former president of NUIG and the present one Jimmy Brown were both on one of these chartered flights to Crete!

http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/32707

Dan_Solo

They're trying to make out that it was one of the NUIG presidents who reported the inappropriate flight expenses, but surely they knew at the time they weren't legit? AFAIK the Crete one was deemed OK by the funding body (SFI) as they were technically all going to a relevant conference. The problem was with the DERI institute's head chartering flights for himself from Germany to Ireland as he was sick of having to change planes! €10,000-€20,000 a pop.
The amazing thing was he didn't even appear to live here while he was head of the institute. How could he possibly have done the required amount of work if he wasn't here? Of course he has conveniently left NUIG.
Bigger scandal is that NUIG is paying it back out of "private income" so there is no "expense to the exchequer". Private slush funds obviously abound in NUIG to pay off thieving former employees... Ever wonder what happens to all that "private income" if they don't have to pay off someone?

pops

Bonuses is what happens!

apoeiguq3094y

Dan_Solo wrote: »

Bigger scandal is that NUIG is paying it back out of "private income" so there is no "expense to the exchequer". Private slush funds obviously abound in NUIG to pay off thieving former employees... Ever wonder what happens to all that "private income" if they don't have to pay off someone?

The college supports a lot of startups and helps bring ideas to the patent stage. In return for investing in new ideas and providing legal advice etc, the college takes a % of the new IP. That generates revenue which is invested back into startup companies and new design ideas.

Alot of this is done through the technology transfer office http://www.nuigalway.ie/tto/ DERI used its revenue from its own IP to pay back the money.

While I understand that people feel private flights are a waste of tax payers money, you have to offer high salaries and big expenses to attract high quality academics. They could easily get the same or better offers in industry.

Dan_Solo

apoeiguq3094y wrote: »

The college supports a lot of startups and helps bring ideas to the patent stage. In return for investing in new ideas and providing legal advice etc, the college takes a % of the new IP. That generates revenue which is invested back into startup companies and new design ideas.

So the college takes PUBLIC money (it is a public body after all), invests it in startups, and then all profits are suddenly PRIVATE. I'm aware of what auditable and non-auditable accounts are, but I wonder if the average taxpayer or student is.
This still doesn't explain why that "private" income is available to pay off misappropraitions by staff.

apoeiguq3094y wrote: »

Alot of this is done through the technology transfer office http://www.nuigalway.ie/tto/ DERI used its revenue from its own IP to pay back the money.

Ditto. What was this money for before it had to be used to pay off these inappropriate expenses? Nothing? It was just sitting in a bank account waiting for exactly this scenario?

apoeiguq3094y wrote: »

While I understand that people feel private flights are a waste of tax payers money, you have to offer high salaries and big expenses to attract high quality academics. They could easily get the same or better offers in industry.

€200,000 p/a and chartered flights? I don't think anyone in industry would be interested in paying that TBH. Plus he's supposed to be an academic, not a businessman. Different skill set on the whole.

Dan_Solo

apoeiguq3094y wrote: »

you have to offer high salaries and big expenses to attract high quality academics.

"CiteSeer sees me at rank 1035 in their list of most cited computer scientists" says the current head of DERI. Wow, #1035 in the world. Easily worth €200,000+ per year.

apoeiguq3094y

Dan_Solo wrote: »

So the college takes PUBLIC money (it is a public body after all), invests it in startups, and then all profits are suddenly PRIVATE. I'm aware of what auditable and non-auditable accounts are, but I wonder if the average taxpayer or student is.
This still doesn't explain why that "private" income is available to pay off misappropraitions by staff.


Ditto. What was this money for before it had to be used to pay off these inappropriate expenses? Nothing? It was just sitting in a bank account waiting for exactly this scenario?

Its still public as it belongs to a state owned university.... who then spend the money on research. Its not as if revenue generated from IP disappears? The money goes back into new startups. What would they do with it? send it back into the exchequer? Which is a bottomless pit really. I can't see how anyone could have a problem with a university successfully generating money to reinvest in new technology.

I don't condone the amount of money spent on travel. They money spent on flights should be used to fund students and research. However, it's a fact of life/society that you have to offer big money to get high caliber directors. A lot of university research is the conducted in a similar fashion to an R&D dept in a multinational so I think that top positions in research bodys are recruited from the same pool as many industries. Many of the department heads at NUIG keep one foot in academia and the other in Industry. To the mutual benefit of both I might add.

Academics aren't like that "A beautiful mind" character who spend their time dressing eccentrically and solving equations on the bathroom mirror. Well not all anyway. In hard sciences and especially engineering people frequently move over and back between academia and industry. Universities encourage it, as it means lecturers and supervisors have real world knowledge.

Dan_Solo

apoeiguq3094y wrote: »

Its still public as it belongs to a state owned university.... who then spend the money on research. Its not as if revenue generated from IP disappears? The money goes back into new startups. What would they do with it? send it back into the exchequer? Which is a bottomless pit really. I can't see how anyone could have a problem with a university successfully generating money to reinvest in new technology.

Ah, but in this case they didn't. So that profit fund is really for anything the university sees fit to spend it on, not necessarily research startups.

apoeiguq3094y wrote: »

Academics aren't like that "A beautiful mind" character who spend their time dressing eccentrically and solving equations on the bathroom mirror. Well not all anyway. In hard sciences and especially engineering people frequently move over and back between academia and industry. Universities encourage it, as it means lecturers and supervisors have real world knowledge.

Then again, this sort of misappropriation on this scale in an industrial setting would most likely lead to sackings, not "leaving by mutual consent". And I've seen my fair share of "beautiful mind" types in science myself to be honest, or to abbreviate "beauts"!