An ongoing audit of 35 universities ― 29 of them private and the remainder either national or public ― has confirmed that there is substantial room for cutting tuition fees without any increase in subsidies from the government.

The Board of Audit and Inspection, which is looking into the books, says the universities have collected an additional annual average of 655.2 billion won ($589 million) during the past five years by bending accounting rules. This accounting fraud is one of the preliminary findings.

The universities have unwarrantedly increased the expenditures by 490.4 billion won while underreporting revenues other than tuition fees by 164.8 billion won. They have made up for the bogus shortfall by raising tuition fees.

If the universities, sampled for an audit, had abided by accounting rules faithfully, the revenues in tuition fees could have been cut by the same amount. Instead, they have engaged in all types of misappropriations to raise tuition fees.

These findings by the state watchdog confirm that demands by students and their parents for drastic cuts in tuition fees are not entirely misplaced. They have been staging a campaign to halve tuition fees, which have doubled during the past 10 years.

A most common accounting malpractice is for a private school foundation to ignore an obligation to make a due contribution to the university and make up the resulting shortfall by increasing tuition fees and misappropriating other revenues. The unfulfilled obligations of the 25 private school foundations have amounted to 230.1 billion won.

Another finding involves misappropriations of government subsidies. The state watchdog says 226.2 billion won in government subsides provided for 19 universities to assist joint research projects with the industrial sector has found its way into their foundations’ accounts.

Still worse, some members of the founding families are found to have embezzled huge amounts of money from the universities. Among them is the chairman of one private school foundation, who is accused of taking 4.32 billion won from the university to help finance the purchase of apartments by his family members.

Where were the supervising authorities when the universities were engaged in all types of lawbreaking? They must be held accountable.

Of course, the watchdog will have to take legal action against all perpetrators and take measures to ensure transparency in bookkeeping when its audit is completed. Then debate can start on how much to cut tuition fees.