Independent Audit Reveals UC Davis Knowingly Inflated Equestrian Budget to Justify Program Elimination

The winning Division 1 Equestrian team is being eliminated by UC Davis Athletics. The Globe reported in April they are fighting for reinstatement, while STUNT is being promoted and elevated by UC Davis and the NCAA. STUNT is governed at the collegiate level by USA Cheer.

According to equestrian team parents and supporters the Globe spoke with, the Athletic Director at UC Davis announced the elimination of the D1 equestrian team on January 9, 2026, despite the program’s close alignment with the university’s agricultural and veterinary missions, two-time conference champion wins at the time, UC Davis’ “Women’s Team of the Year” award, and team members’ consistently high GPAs.

Notably, 16 Aggies were selected by the National Collegiate Equestrian Association Committee for their standout academic achievements throughout the season, recognizing the student-athletes on the 2025-26 All-Academic teams and Academic Honor Roll. The NCEA recognized those student athletes who have reached the highest standards of excellence in both the arena and the classroom, UC Davis reported April 8th.

At the end of April, parents and supporters of the UC Davis NCAA Division 1 Women’s Equestrian team released the initial findings of an independent audit conducted by OSKR, a leading economic and accounting firm. The audit reveals what advocates have asserted since January: UC Davis leadership used fundamentally flawed data, manipulated donation reporting, and ignored standard accounting principles to create a false narrative of “budget challenges.”

“At its core, the standard ‘NCAA’ accounting system requires disconnection between the actual cash flow benefits/costs of activities and the required accounting treatment. The result of this disconnect is that many expense line items float untethered from the related revenues they generate,” the audit opens with.

The OSKR audit report provides definitive confirmation that the university’s justification for cutting the championship team – a supposed $1 million-plus in savings – is a mathematical fiction.

The audit continues:

One very basic example of this problem is the athletic scholarship expense. When an athlete attends UC-Davis on a 5% scholarship, this means they are paying UC-Davis 95% of the full price they would be charged without that scholarship assistance. Given that the typical UC-Davis student receives more than a 5% discount, this transaction is generating more cash for the university than if the enrollment slot had gone to the average student. But as required by the NCAA’s system, UC-Davis must record the 5% discount as an expense for the athletic department, but may not record the payment of tuition (at 95% of list price) as athletic department revenue. For athletes receiving 100% scholarship, such as is typical in football or basketball, the omission of revenue is not important (though there may be other reasons why recording the expense at list price may be wrong). But in sports where the average athlete is receiving less than a 50% grant-in- aid, the failure to match revenues with recorded expenses dramatically skews the financial picture presented by the biased accounting, in the sense that there is a fundamental error that goes in one direction, overstating net outflows.

“We hired OSKR to independently determine whether UC Davis had indeed provided Collegiate Consulting inflated and incorrect figures to justify a predetermined outcome,” said the parent coalition. “This external audit proves that Athletic Director Rocko DeLuca and CFO Sean Quinn presented a distorted financial picture to the Chancellor. It’s clear now more than ever that the two men have caused irreparable harm to female student-athletes while providing no actual net savings to the university.”

Back when we spoke, the parents said they went through all of the budget expenses: horses, equipment, stalls, coaches, game-day, travel, meals… “we came up with $750,000 – $800,000.” They added up the horses, vet bills, travel, memberships, and did not come close to the UC Davis claim of $1.9 million. And a Collegiate Consulting report claimed the figure was $2,066.00.

Then they started digging into claimed expenses and found claims of $30,000 fundraising and marketing charges, which parents said is 23 to 78 times other schools’ fundraising and marketing costs. “There’s a $1.1 million differential we can’t account for,” a parent told the Globe. “The Collegiate Consulting report is really inflated.”

Parents report that the Equestrian expenses were inflated by more than $1 million through accounting distortions, including:

Misrepresenting operating expenses as operating budgets
Removing legitimate revenue such as fundraising and tuition impact
Counting a fictional offset for in-kind donations as a real expense, contrary to standard accounting practices

The audit continues:

As will be seen below, this is critical for assessing two of the UC-Davis equestrian team’s expense items: athletic aid (scholarships) and equipment (as relates to the team’s horses themselves). The former expense is overstated because it fails to recognize the corresponding revenue attributable to those expenses. The latter should be zeroed out entirely, because the expense is perfectly offset by the in-kind revenue the school recognizes to reflect that the horses are not actually an expense at all, but rather simply a zero-cost, zero-interest loan.

A related issue comes from when athletic department expense items correspond with revenues for other parts of the university. This relates primarily to an element of “other expense” related to boarding fees. Obviously, the care and feeding of a horse costs money, but as it stands, the value that UC-Davis athletics records for that expense is not the actual cost to the university of those expenses, but rather simply the list price charged by UC Davis Campus Recreation for the services it provides. The actual cost, which is likely lower, should be reflected in any assessment of the sport’s costs; use of the transfer price will only be right if the recreation department is charging athletics its direct, marginal cost. These points are discussed in more detail below and in the accompanying spreadsheets.

The OSKR analysis highlights several critical errors and gross overstatements in the university’s reported costs:

Horse Donations: The university recorded $665,000 in “in-kind contributions” for donated horses as an expense without applying the required NCAA offset. These horses represent a zero-cost donation, but were used to artificially bloat the budget.
Boarding Costs: The team is burdened with $175,000 to $200,000 in boarding fees charged by the school’s own Equestrian Center. This is an internal transfer where the “expense” to the team is revenue for the university.
Coaching Salaries: UC Davis did not include the coaching salaries in their comparisons between sports which predictably understates the cost of certain sports (men’s football and basketball) relative to others (women’s equestrian).
Overhead Cost Inflation: In 2024, UC Davis reported $168,703 in Equestrian Team expenses – 45 times the average from 2019-2023. This is an unusual expense, mistake, or an outlier and should not be used to calculate the true cost to run the team.

By correcting for the above issues, OSKR found that UC Davis and Collegiate Counseling overstated the team’s true operating expenses by more than 120% or by more than $850,000. These OSKR findings drop the Women’s Equestrian team’s per-athlete spending rank from “second highest” as stated in UC Davis internal emails and in the Collegiate Consulting report to 15^th among UC Davis sports once everything is properly accounted.

In addition, while UC Davis claims the equestrian team’s scholarship costs are a burden, the audit also revealed the team is actually a net positive to the university. Equestrian receives only 5 scholarships for 40 athletes, and a large percentage of the team’s athletes are from out of state, meaning there is a large net tuition revenue per student. Therefore, when adjusting for tuition, equestrian is the third least expensive sport at UC Davis. In fact, the team as a whole pays approximately 17 times more in aggregate tuition to attend UC Davis than the men’s basketball team.

“Our previous analyses uncovered Title IX disparities and found that UC Davis’ reported equestrian costs were nearly ten times higher than peer institutions like Fresno State,” said the parent coalition. “Today, OSKR’s initial report finds that UC Davis inflated every possible line item for Equestrian. Leadership blatantly chose to destroy a winning program and the careers of female athletes based on a biased approach. As OSKR completes the audit, we demand the immediate reinstatement of the team and a full investigation into the Athletics Department’s Title IX deficiencies.”

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Katy Grimes

Katy Grimes, the Editor in Chief of the California Globe, is a long-time Investigative Journalist covering the California State Capitol, the co-author of California's War Against Donald Trump: Who Wins? Who Loses? and a contributor to "Taxifornia 2016."
A California native and Navy mom, Katy lives in Sacramento, CA.

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