Selected characteristics of California State University nonprofit charitable foundations and their relationship with comprehensive internal control and compliance audit findings

The primary purpose of this study is to explore what relationship, if any, exists between the number of the 1999-2002 California State University (referred to as CSU) comprehensive internal control and compliance audit findings of CSU nonprofit charitable foundations and their selected organizational characteristics. These organizational characteristics address 3 areas: (a) the foundation (auxiliary) itself, (b) its management and staff, and (c) its board of directors. The secondary purpose of this study is to identify certain demographic characteristics of CSU foundations as they relate to structure, function, and accountability issues.; The researcher has chosen the CSU system as the setting for this study. Cited as the largest comprehensive public university system in the United States, its 23 campuses are dispersed geographically and offer a paradigm of small, medium, and large institutions at various stages of development. Specifically, this study focuses upon a sample of 22 CSU foundations and their relationship with audit findings. The study utilizes a quantitative research approach and nonexperimental design with an application of inferential and descriptive statistical analyses.; The study results generated 2 statistically significant findings. First, the research findings show that the percent of internal (university) board members of CSU foundations has a significant impact on the number audit findings. More than 24% of variation in the number of audit findings can be attributed to the percent of university board members of a foundation. Conclusions of the study suggest that the higher the percent of the university board members, the more audit findings a CSU foundation is likely to experience.; Second, CSU foundations providing real estate management function have a significantly lower number of audit findings that the ones that do not ( M = 13.4 vs. M = 19.1). As a result, this study concludes that the fact that a certain service function is provided by a CSU foundation may not necessary result in a higher number of audit findings.; Certain demographic characteristics of this study are presented in Chapter 4. Although the additional four findings of this study were not statistically significant, they are likely worthy of further research as described in Chapter 5.