Auditor’s Office Obtains ECSU Phone Records
J. Andrew Curliss, News Observer, October 23, 2013
The state auditor’s office is apparently investigating international phone calls made from Elizabeth City State University as officials at the school say they also are conducting an inquiry into tens of thousands spent on calls abroad.
Email messages show that an investigator with the auditor’s office obtained records of the calls in September and October.
New records show phone calls from the university to the West African nation of Senegal cost more than $142,000 in a nearly four-year period that began in September 2009.
The News & Observer last month detailed more than $100,000 in calls to Senegal from ECSU in a narrower period covering 27 months.
The new records show there were about 5,500 calls made from the university to Senegal since September 2009.
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In all, university phones called nearly 500 different numbers in Senegal. {snip}
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University officials have not been able to explain the calls, which all are listed as coming from the main ECSU number. But documents and interviews suggest the calls are tied to a federal program in which ECSU professors wrote and helped produce textbooks for Senegalese schoolchildren from 2009 to 2012.
The textbook program director, ECSU professor Abdou Maty Sene, said previously there were “a lot of phone calls” from the university to Senegal and that the program was “very demanding as far as the communication is concerned.”
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[Editor’s Note: See also this story about Elizabeth City State University.]
