Florida legislators say that they have lost faith in the ability of Florida A&M University administrators to oversee taxpayer dollars and are seeking to take away the institution’s financial oversight of the engineering college it runs with Florida State University.

In their budgets for 2007-8, leaders of the State Senate and House of Representatives have moved $10.4-million in state funds to run the engineering college from Florida A&M, the state’s only historically black public institution, to Florida State, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. State Sen. Evelyn J. Lynn, a Republican who is chairwoman of the Higher Education Appropriations Committee, also has put $100,000 in the Senate’s budget proposal to pay for an outside audit of the university, according to the newspaper.

A recent report by the Florida auditor general found $39-million in undocumented expenditures at the university, prompting state lawmakers to call for a criminal investigation. The auditor’s report, which followed a routine biennial examination of university operations, identified several instances of bookkeeping discrepancies and unaccounted-for spending, including a $2.7-million inconsistency in student-financial-aid transactions; nearly 1,000 missing pieces of equipment with a total value of $2.7-million; and misplaced records for $1.8-million in athletics-ticket sales.

The chancellor of Florida’s public-university system, Mark Rosenberg, has appointed a special committee to help Florida A&M University fix its longstanding financial and management problems. He said that the panel would carry out a thorough examination of the university’s finances and develop a plan to quickly resolve the college’s financial and operational problems. —Sara Hebel