College Sports Council Confronts GAO on
"Enron Accounting"
WASHINGTON, D.C. - September 12, 2003 - The College
Sports Council (CSC) filed suit in federal court today against the General
Accounting Office (GAO), the Comptroller General David M. Walker, and a GAO
staffer named Marnie S. Shaul. The suit challenges a 2001 GAO study, cited
in the final report of the Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, on the
grounds that it failed to accurately assess the impact of Title IX enforcement
on college and scholastic athletics.
The GAO report claims that men's opportunities increased by 36 teams between
1981 and 1998, but ignores the increase of 134 schools in its survey population
between 1981 and 1998. The GAO report also fails to count women's teams
that existed in 1981, but were not members of either the National Collegiate
Athletic Association (NCAA) or the National Intercollegiate Athletic Association
(NAIA). In 1981, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW)
had more than 900 member schools. AIAW disbanded in 1983, after the NCAA
and NAIA began to sponsor women's sports.
"By ignoring thousands of pre-existing men's and women's athletic teams,
-the GAO grossly understated men's losses and overstated women's gains in the
1980's and 1990's," says Eric Pearson, CSC's Executive Director.
"We support the continued growth of athletic opportunities for women and
girls, but we cannot accept Dr. Shaul's continued denial that Title IX
enforcement has led to the arbitrary elimination of thousands of athletic
opportunities and programs at schools across the nation."
"Interestingly, Comptroller General Walker is an alumnus of Arthur
Anderson," commented Leo Kocher, President of the CSC "which provides
an object lesson of what not to do when a subordinate produces fraudulent
reports." Arthur Anderson went out of business as a result of its
Houston Office's involvement with Enron's accounting practices. "Just
like those recent corporate accounting
scandals, the GAO report masks persistent, significant losses with false gains
from mergers," added Kocher.
The GAO report fails to discuss the budgetary impact of "capping," a
common Title IX strategy in which schools set artificially low squad-size limits
for men's teams to comply with the Department of Education's quota on
participation. By ignoring Congress's directive to quantify the negligible
or nonexistent budgetary benefits of capping, the GAO report allows the
gender-quota advocates to continue to say that budgets, not Title IX, cause the
loss of men's athletic opportunities.
Although a GAO employee, the report's author, Dr. Shaul, has worked closely with
gender-quota advocates such as the Women's Sports Foundation and repeatedly has
testified that men's opportunities increased during the 1980s and 1990s.
"The fraudulent GAO report should be withdrawn and a new one prepared as
Congress originally intended," added Pearson. "And the letter of the
law should be upheld."
_______________________________________________________________
Following the Administration's refusal to accept the recommendations of the
Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, the College Sports Council (CSC)--a
coalition of coaches, alumni, parents and athletes-on August 15 launched a new
lawsuit against the Secretary of Education to repeal its Title IX enforcement
policies.
