The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

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February 11, 2008

Attorney calls on ORU to turn over financial audit

The Associated Press

TULSA, Okla. — An attorney challenged Oral Roberts University Monday to make public an audit of the school’s finances, saying that if school leaders had nothing to hide, they would turn it over.

Last fall, with the evangelical school mired in debt and a spending scandal, ORU’s board of regents ordered an outside firm to conduct the audit. Its contents were never made public.

Last week, Tulsa attorney Gary Richardson filed a lawsuit on behalf of Trent Huddleston, a former senior accountant at ORU who alleged that more than $1 billion annually was inappropriately funneled through the school. Named as defendants are Richard Roberts, the school’s former president, and his wife, Lindsay, along with former regents.

University officials dismissed those allegations.

“Why don’t they just turn over the audit?” Richardson asked Monday. “If a reasonable man had information that he believed proved him in the right, wouldn’t they disclose it?”

Mart Green, the Oklahoma City businessman who donated $70 million to the school and became chairman its new board of trustees last month, said Monday he didn’t have access to the report and didn’t know if it could be released publicly.

“We need to get more information from our legal team before we make that decision,” Green said in a statement issued through the university. “Like I said before, the results from the audit our family performed showed we could fully support ORU with our proposed changes.

Richardson questioned whether Green, had truly “seen everything” during the audit.

“I think if ... ORU doesn’t come clean and lay everything before the people to show it is the truth, I think (the lawsuit) is going to create a life of its own,” Richardson said.

Besides the accountant, Richardson is also representing two former ORU professors and two students in lawsuits against the university. The school has settled one lawsuit with a professor, resulting in his reinstatement.

In his lawsuit, Huddleston claimed he discovered an “unrestricted” account used to funnel “unusually large” sums of money through the university each month — which would exceed $1 billion on an annual basis — that wasn’t used for any legitimate university purpose.

Huddleston, who was hired in 2006 and spent 15 months at the school, said he was discharged because school officials feared he would reveal that the account existed.

Huddleston’s lawsuit, the latest to hit the scandal-plagued university, amended a complaint he filed in late November against ORU.

The initial complaint alleged Huddleston was ordered to help Richard and Lindsay Roberts “cook the books” by hiding improper and illegal financial wrongdoing from authorities and the public.

It also claimed that he was directed against his will to falsely list thousands of dollars as expenses rather than assets — which were spent remodeling the home of Richard and Lindsay Roberts — in order to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies.

Roberts resigned as president days after Huddleston’s initial lawsuit was filed. He and his wife have repeatedly denied wrongdoing.

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