01/29/92

CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558

Cornell audit director accepts Stanford position

STANFORD -- Glen C. Mueller, director of auditing at Cornell University, has been appointed director of internal audit at Stanford University, effective Feb. 7.

Stanford Chief Financial Officer Peter Van Etten, who announced the appointment, called Mueller, 41, "one of the outstanding university internal auditors in the country."

In six years at Cornell, Mueller initiated extensive use of computers in auditing, developed a program to provide audit support to the Defense Contract Audit Agency, chaired a campuswide analysis of Cornell's financial information systems, and chaired a task force to study university policies and redefine the policy formulation process.

He also developed, and for four years taught, the auditing course at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Mueller said he was attracted to the Stanford job because it is "the key leadership challenge" in higher education auditing. He will become part of a relatively new team of senior managers who are reorganizing the university's financial system in the wake of disputes with the federal government over indirect costs.

Mueller succeeds Reed Brimhall, who joined Stanford last April as director of internal audit and, as part of a major reorganization of the Controller's Office in October, launched the newly created position of director of government cost and rate studies.

Van Etten said Brimhall, who in the interim continued running internal audit, has done "an exceptional job of managing two enormously difficult areas." In his new position, Brimhall manages the university's overall, ongoing relationship with the government, including indirect cost rate negotiations. Mueller now will serve as the university's liaison for all external audit activities.

Mueller said his first task would be to "fine tune" the reorganization plans developed by Brimhall last August in which he shifted the internal audit department from a unit that performed management and organizational audits to one that focused on financial and compliance audits. Mueller immediately will begin filling seven or eight vacancies, including key managers for the unit. The reformulated department needs certified public accountants, experienced health care auditors and additional computer systems expertise.

Van Etten said that an important component of Mueller's job would be designing a program to identify potential financial risks throughout the university. This is especially important, Van Etten said, as the university moves to a more decentralized environment.

Auditors will "not act like a big brother looking over peoples' shoulders," Van Etten said, but in the wake of the indirect cost controversy, "we must be certain that controls are more effective to protect the university from financial exposure."

One of Mueller's successes at Cornell has been his nationally recognized program of coordinating internal audit work with the Defense Contract Audit Agency. He said his unit has provided extensive computer audit support for DCAA for the past nine months. In addition, Cornell's internal audit department has performed indirect cost audits directly for DCAA reliance.

"My whole approach to auditing is very computerized," Mueller said, explaining that his staff routinely writes computer programs to analyze accounting data, to search records for unusual items and to generate random samples for testing. At Cornell, Mueller chaired a task force that evaluated Cornell's nine major computerized financial systems and was on the executive steering committee for administrative systems.

Mueller is certified as a public accountant in New York. He earned two degrees at Cornell: a bachelor's in economics in 1972 and a master's in business administration, specializing in finance and accounting, in 1974.

Before going to Cornell, Mueller was vice president for information services at AMAX Metals Group, Greenwich, Conn. Earlier in his career, he worked for the accounting firm Arthur Young & Co. in Worcester, Mass. He is involved in numerous professional organizations and is a frequent speaker at the Association of College and University Auditors' annual meetings and workshops.

Mueller will report directly to Van Etten, with an independent reporting relationship to the audit committee of the Board of Trustees and Stanford University Hospital's board of directors. He also will have an informal relationship with, and direct access to, both the university and hospital presidents.

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