John Simpson did receive at least $474,118 in compensation on top of his $265,000 state salary in 2008.
Though the UB Office of University Communications insists that such numbers were arrived at sloppily and inaccurately, it's true.
Public records and tax forms show that an Artvoice journalist under fire by the UB administration has added the numbers up correctly in his investigation of the compensation of top-level UB officials.
An official university "Fact Sheet" has attempted to convince the community otherwise, but it is not entirely factual, and it does not contain any proof or evidence of its own.
Background
A March 31 Artvoice piece titled "The Great UB Heist," written by associate editor Buck Quigley, reports extensively on the UB Foundation (UBF) – a UB-affiliated, not-for-profit, private organization that handles private gifts to the university – and the additional compensation that top-level UB officials received from UBF, among other things.
UBF's mission "is to support and promote the activities and programs of [UB] by providing advice and counsel regarding philanthropy and fund raising, managing gifts and grants on behalf of the university, providing a wide range of financial services for the various units of the university, developing and managing real property on behalf of the university, and providing a strong base of private-sector support for the university through the foundation's trustees and directors," according to its website, which is a part of the buffalo.edu domain.
Over the course of Quigley's work on the Artvoice article, he lost a court decision in which he contended that UBF was subject to Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests. An Erie County judge ruled that, being private, UBF does not have to provide access to records, despite the fact that it acts on behalf of a public university.
The day after the article ran, the UB Office of University Communications issued a "Fact Sheet" that disputed many of Artvoice's claims.
"The Fact Sheet was compiled by the Office of University Communications in collaboration with people throughout the university and input from the UB Foundation," said Assistant Vice President for Media Relations John DellaContrada. "The provost's office emailed it to deans and vice presidents....It was distributed to campus communicators and people out in the community who asked about the veracity of the article."
Administrator Compensation
A graphic accompanying Quigley's piece listed various top-level UB officials' compensation – such as outgoing President John B. Simpson's $739,118 – adding state salaries and UBF compensation together to arrive at a final figure.
The Fact Sheet asks, "Is the information about executive salaries and UBF compensation accurate?" and answers, "No. There are inaccuracies and sloppy math."
The Fact Sheet provides no numbers of its own to support that claim.
"You don't just say ‘mistaken,'" said James Holstun, a professor in the English department. "It's a university; you make a claim, you give reasons."
Artvoice's numbers are accurate.
"It is profoundly contrary to basic scholarly standards to accuse anyone of inaccuracies without providing a single example of inaccuracy," Quigley said in an email. "The information presented on salaries derives from simple arithmetic performed on publicly-reported amounts."
The Spectrum found the numbers and added them up.
Do the Math
In 2008, 2009, and 2010, Simpson received his annual state salary of $265,000, according to SeeThroughNY.net, a website that uses "official government sources" to give "New Yorkers a clearer view of how their state and local tax dollars are spent."
An IRS tax form (990) (available at GuideStar.org, a website that "gather[s] and publicize[s] information about nonprofit organizations") for the 2008-9 fiscal year shows that UBF paid Simpson $216,779 and that he also received $67,424 from UBF "and other related organizations."
Additionally, The Chronicle of Higher Education's website shows that in the same fiscal year, Simpson received $85,000 from private sources and $17,600 in retirement pay.
Finally, the university further compensates Simpson with a house at 88 Lebrun Road. Another 990 tax form (also from GuideStar.org) for the 2008-9 fiscal year shows that the UBF-affiliated FNUB, Inc. receives $87,315 in "program service revenue" for the house.
$265,000 + $216,779 + $67,424 + $85,000 + $17,600 + $87,315 = $739,118; the same number is printed in the Artvoice story.
The Spectrum was also able to verify all of Quigley's figures for Vice President David L. Dunn ($765,429), Medical School Dean Michael E. Cain ($595,425), and recently departed Vice President Scott D. Nostaja ($507,307) in the same manner. The UBF 990 tax form shows that all of them, including Simpson, worked an average of 40 hours per week for UBF (while also being paid as full-time state employees), which the Artvoice story also noted.
Duly Noted
The Spectrum was not able to validate the UBF compensations for the other six people on the list (Vice President Marsha Henderson, incoming President Satish Tripathi, Vice President Kathryn V. Costello, former Senior Advisor to the President James A. Willis, Assistant Dean George Braen, and Assistant Vice President Carol J. Kobrin), but the SUNY salaries listed for them on the Artvoice chart are accurate, according to SeeThroughNY.net.
Quigley said that information about those employees' UBF compensation was obtained from paperwork provided to him during the court proceeding by a UBF-affiliated law firm. He was willing to provide the paperwork to The Spectrum, but as it is not available electronically, it was not available at press time.
"Salary data was incorrect in four instances," DellaContrada said in an email.
He added that the figures were not in front of him and that figures could not be provided before press time.
"I will say that I did look at those numbers that were reported in [the Artvoice article] and I did find some inaccuracies," said Rick Kustich, director of assets and revenues at UBF. "…We want to be as transparent as possible."
Kustich told The Spectrum Tuesday afternoon that he would call the newsroom after taking a look at the numbers. He had not called back before press time (late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning).
"If any of [my] information is inaccurate—particularly that provided to the IRS—I encourage responsible parties at UB to correct it as quickly as possible," Quigley said in an email. "There may well be further inaccuracies, in the form of further payments… which remain covert. There's something ludicrous about someone hiding information and simultaneously complaining about inaccuracies. The multiple sources of compensation, some visible, some invisible, are precisely the problem: they make transparency impossible."
It should be noted that for Quigley's calculations, he used 2010 state salary data and added it together with UBF compensation data from the fiscal year 2008-9. This is apparent in the Artvoice article. SeeThroughNY.net shows, though, that these employees' state salaries do not differ by any relatively noteworthy amount from year to year, if they differ at all.
Braen, Cain, Dunn, Henderson, and Tripathi all received raises in their state salaries in 2010, and Costello received a raise in 2009, according to SeeThroughNY.net.
Roughly $80 million in state budget cuts to UB and other SUNY schools occurred over the past three years, as the Fact Sheet acknowledges.
He Said, They Said
"[Quigley] has a history of bias against the university, did not call anyone at the university about some of the issues he raised in the article, did not bother trying to confirm any facts," DellaContrada said.
DellaContrada also said, in an email, that "UBF and the university have invited Quigley several times to sit down and discuss his concerns and questions. He has refused."
Quigley said that he had been invited after being denied FOIL requests and interviews with top-level officials, but he wasn't interested in "a little sit-down" and being "handed brochures."
"I think I'd had enough info from them by that time," Quigley said in a phone interview. "The article was written after the outcome of the court case, so no, I didn't contact [DellaContrada] since then, but I've got tons and tons of conversations and emails back and forth with him since this all began, since I first started looking into it, so there was plenty of conversation with him."
Quigley said his issue with the university was its transparency.
"For the record, I'm a UB alum," Quigley said. "I love UB. I think I've made it clear what I'm concerned about."
Editor in Chief Andrew Wiktor contributed to this report.
Stay with The Spectrum in the coming issues for a follow-up piece.
Email: news@ubspectrum.com
