Alabama A&M fixes years-long sports ticket accounting issues, goes cashless

6 hours ago 4

College sports create belonging, togetherness and generate memories. For the schools, it also generates revenue from ticket sales to events.

At Alabama A&M University state audits show the school has had a problem the past two decades with keeping track of the tickets they sell to its sporting events. Because of that, Bulldog fans at all sporting events beginning this fall will see a change in the way they buy their tickets.

After first introducing it during the most recent basketball season, the process is now cashless.

University President Daniel Wims’ has made solving the issue raised in the audits a priority, A&M Athletics Director Paul Bryant told AL.com.

“When the president hired me, he said, among several priorities, this was a major one,” the athletics director said. ”He said, ‘AD Bryant, I need you to fix this system.’”

For the financial audit spanning 2008 to 2013, the auditors looked into the Homecoming football game between the A&M Bulldogs and Mississippi’s Alcorn State University on Oct. 13, 2012.

The report revealed that the university could not locate unsold tickets for the game and identified issues with parking ticket accounting.

The Athletics Department sales manager signed off on receipts totaling $29,987 after the game, despite the itemized breakdown showing only $28,309—primarily from parking ticket sales. This created a discrepancy of more than $1,600.

“The University was not able to locate the unsold parking tickets to verify the total of the returned tickets listed on the Parking Cash Collection Form,” the report stated.

Without access to the unsold parking tickets, auditors had no way to verify the accuracy of returned ticket totals documented in the collection form.

Fast-forward to the latest state audit covering 2018 to 2022 and things didn’t change much. The school only fully reconciled game-day ticket sales, but not discounts and complimentary tickets. The auditors determined that “accountability for tickets printed and sold is not being maintained by the Athletics Department.”

Bryant said he began investigating the matter after his appointment in August 2022 and found exactly the problem the auditors outlined.

None of the reports covering 2019-2022 financial years available on the website of Alabama Department of Examiners of Public Accounts raised any issue about missing money related to the ticket problems.

“The reconciliation, that’s the biggest thing,” Bryant said. “So let’s say that we didn’t sell tickets. We never put them back in the system. And that was huge. So if you don’t put them back in the system, it looks like they were sold.”

He said he immediately began reforming the system. Now, according to him, the department does a full accounting of all tickets by the Monday following a Saturday game. He called it the 48-hour reconciliation rule. Also, his team developed a complimentary ticket policy, and school auditors routinely checked their books, and partnered with Hometown, a ticketing platform.

“So we put our checks and balances in to make sure we’re trying to eliminate that consistent issue,” the athletics director said.

Additionally, Alabama A&M is going cashless this fall in all its sporting activities, after beginning with basketball in 2024, according to Bryant.

He said the new process would use credit cards, Apple Pay, and move towards eliminating paper, with everyone having a code on their phones similar to the modern concert experience.

“I think that is huge because everything is automated, and we can identify every possible area of ticketing,” Bryant said. ”Going cashless makes us that much more accountable for everything that we do because everything is on the system.

“We had signs out saying that in 2025, everything will be cashless,” he added. ”Honestly, it just helps us with the accounting, things like that. So there’s no ambiguity there at all. Everything is right there.”

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