By Anna Mitchell

Originally published 06:12 p.m., January 13, 2011

Updated 06:12 p.m., January 13, 2011

CLEMSON — Clemson University’s football team spent $135,130 on a chartered flight in October.

Its basketball teams spent more than $177,000 on chartered flights that month, too.

Such nuggets of financial information along with thousands of others are available now on the university’s new financial transparency website, available at transpend.clemson.edu/.

Clemson is among seven state-funded colleges and universities to commit to posting all its financial transactions online. It is also the first to go ahead and do so, with the site launched a week ago.

The effort was spearheaded by South Carolina Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom, who challenged higher education institutions to take accounting data already available in digital form and post it on the Internet.

Legislation pre-filed by House and Senate members in Columbia would make the postings mandatory.

Eckstrom said the data is limited by accounting norms but could be improved over time.

“There’s little cost involved in extracting the information,” Eckstrom said Thursday, “Does it contain plain-language explanations? No. Could a transactions site include that information? Yeah. If it did, it would push up the effort and the cost significantly.”

The sky is the limit, he said, when providing explanations of individual expenditures.

“It will never be enough,” he said. “In a perfect world where cost isn’t a factor, you could write a paragraph or a page on every transaction — who made it, what benefit the university, the traveler or the spender gets from it.”

Last week during a Columbia press conference, other colleges and universities that promised to post their transactions were the University of South Carolina, Francis Marion University, The Citadel, Lander University, Coastal Carolina and Trident Technical College. Tri-County Tech has also said it would try to post its transactions, and Eckstrom said he heard from the Medical University of South Carolina on Wednesday saying the same.

Clemson’s website was designed and launched internally with no personnel involved beyond existing members of the Clemson Computing and Information Technology Department, said Brett Dalton, the university’s chief financial officer. Clemson spokesman John Gouch also helped a bit with the site’s wording to make it more user-friendly.

Dalton said last week he looks forward to operational efficiencies that might emerge from the site’s going live.

Gouch said the university hasn’t received any feedback since publicizing its address on Wednesday, but already foresees improvements the university’s information technology team will pursue in the future.

Currently, the site lists and organizes data by fiscal year, month, fund type and accounting categories. But users can’t customize a search by department, program, vendor or amount.

Sports is relatively easy to narrow down because it is among a handful of independent, self-funded operations included in the group “Auxiliary Funds.

But a search of entries under the group “Educational and General Funds” yields 8,801 transactions out of departments ranging from Campus Utilities to Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Vendors range from the Ogletree law firm in Greenville to Glass and Mirror Unlimited.

“We’d like to do a search by vendor,” Gouch said. “They are working on that. But we wanted to get this launched. It’s something we knew we could do.”

The site does offer a starting point for anyone interested in studying spending trends for the university, Eckstrom said.

“Agencies got into the habit of saying 'Send us a Freedom of Information request,’” Eckstrom said. “There’s an invariably 15-day delay, then discussion on how much it cost. That’s nonsense. The Internet has taken that excuse away.”

Eckstrom said he has struggled in the past to extract financial information from the state’s colleges and universities. That era, he said, seems to be coming to an end.

“Now they are racing each other to provide this,” he said. “That’s the beauty of this. The peer pressure. No one wants to be outdone.”