Our Board of Governors has established a Risk Management and Audit Committee. This committee is chaired by Gov. Greg Spears and has been charged with overseeing the university’s audit, compliance and risk management operations.

The role of the committee

The Risk Management and Audit Committee will be responsible for:

• Monitoring external audits
• Directing and receiving work of the university’s internal auditor
• Receiving reports of all NCAA and NJCAA audits
• Overseeing the university’s enterprise risk management efforts
• Following up on major risk management issues and concerns

The committee met last week to receive three reports from the university’s internal auditor. I want to update you one of those reports related to the ethics hotline.

Ethical leadership is one of the pillars of our public affairs mission. Missouri State University has a long tradition of operating in a professional and ethical manner. As part of this commitment, the university provides various mechanisms to assist and encourage employees, students and others to come forward with reports or concerns about suspected compliance issues.

Report ethical, compliance concerns

One mechanism is a third-party anonymous hotline service called EthicsPoint. An individual may contact this hotline service either by phone or internet, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All reports are routed directly to the office of internal audit and compliance and the office of general counsel for review and then directed to the appropriate institutional official.

To make an EthicsPoint report, you may call 1-888-233-8988 or go to the Missouri State ethics hotline webpage.

The recent internal auditor’s report indicates there have been 113 ethics hotline reports filed with the university’s third party hotline vendor since the hotline was initiated in 2007. All 113 reports were investigated.

For the last three years, hotline reports addressed the following:

• 42 percent dealt with employee or supervisory misconduct
• 27 percent dealt with discrimination, harassment or equal opportunity
• 13 percent dealt with sexual harassment
• 5 percent dealt with conflicts of interest
• 13 percent dealt with some other matter

If you have any compliance or other concerns, I would encourage you to notify your supervisor or, if you do not feel comfortable doing so, to utilize EthicsPoint. Together we can monitor the university’s compliance and ensure that Missouri State University remains a model for ethical leadership.

Thanks for all you do for Missouri State!