Durham: State audit finds gaps in NCCU procurement and travel card programs

The North Carolina Office of the State Auditor released a performance audit Monday of North Carolina Central University's procurement card and travel card programs.

The report, PER-2026-6090, is dated October 2026 and was first published Oct. 19. It covers card use from July 1, 2025, through Feb. 28, 2026. In that window the university processed 6,027 card transactions totaling about $2.8 million. Auditors looked at 477 of those purchases, totaling $371,645. They said that sample was not statistical, so the results do not stand in for every charge.

State Auditor Dave Boliek's office said the university did not consistently follow its own card rules. The report's landing page says NCCU agreed with the results.

What the auditors found

University policy called for card charges to be reviewed, reconciled and approved each week. Of the 477 transactions in the sample, 87 (18 percent), totaling $83,856, were reviewed between 7 and 267 days after that deadline.

Fifty-six transactions (12 percent), totaling $46,644, were missing required paperwork. Eight of those, totaling $5,349, had no required receipts. Forty-eight, totaling $41,295, had no written business purpose.

Fifty-two transactions (11 percent), totaling $21,186, went through without a supervisor looking at them. The report said the card system could be set to approve a charge automatically once documents were uploaded.

On purchases that broke the university's own limits, auditors counted:

• 27 transactions totaling $16,437 by people who had not finished required P-Card training before they used the card.
• 38 travel-card transactions totaling $22,638 that did not qualify as allowed travel spending.
• 58 transactions totaling $35,098 that the card manual forbids, including invoice items, vendors that bill through a third party, travel, and subscriptions.
• 16 transactions totaling $6,865 that split five purchases into smaller pieces so they would stay under set limits.

The university had 140 issued cardholders. Seven of them (5 percent) had at least one spending cap above the amount on their approved application. Two people had approved monthly limits of $5,000 and system limits of $50,000. Auditors also found two temporary single-purchase increases, to $1,790 and $1,250, with no file showing those bumps were approved.

What the auditor recommended

The report asked NCCU to watch reviews more closely, keep the required paperwork, train cardholders and reviewers on a repeating schedule, turn off auto-approval, and check system spending limits against the written approvals. It also asked the university to look into charges that break the rules and to document what happens next.

What NCCU said

Chancellor Karrie G. Dixon's letter, dated Sept. 22, 2026, is in the report. She said the university agrees with the findings and the recommendations.

Dixon wrote that work on the cards started in April 2025, including updated manuals, electronic application forms, required e-learning, and a standard way to record violations. She said the automatic-approval setting was turned off in October 2025, while the audit was underway, and that a charge is no longer approved only because documents were uploaded. Existing card users, she wrote, had to retake training in March 2026. A Bank of America card-violation form was added in August 2026.

She said leftover work — weekly exception reports, escalation when a review is late, closer monitoring, and related steps — is due Dec. 31, 2026. A check of every active cardholder's single-purchase, daily and monthly limits against the approved amounts is due Nov. 30, 2026. The first yearly limit review is due June 30, 2027.

The report does not say whether any of the sampled charges will be repaid.

For the findings and Dixon's letter, use PER-2026-6090 on auditor.nc.gov. This site is not the auditor and not NCCU.