Eastern is jumping through bookkeeping hoops in order to get some much-needed cash flow.

The university will receive just under $3 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Only “positive time reporting” employees, or those who fill out time cards, are eligible for reimbursement under the act.

Most of Eastern’s employees do not fall into this category.

The stimulus money will cover about 30 percent of a month’s expenses, said treasurer Paul McCann. To date, Eastern has received only $17.5 million of its $50.6 million appropriation from the state of Illinois.

McCann said all of Illinois’ public universities want to get the information ready by the end of March, but Eastern’s yearly positive time reporting payroll will not amount to $3 million until April.

“The stimulus money requires that we provide them with a lot of detailed information about what and who we spent the money on, why we spent it, what they were doing, how much time they were doing it,” McCann said.

“So we are in the process of pulling all of that information together.”

Eastern must submit detailed information on hourly employees including name, department, position, hours worked and the percent of their yearly pay it represents.

McCann is working on moving some hourly employees who have already been used to request state funding. Eastern will be able to go back to January 1 to pull down payroll figures to request federal reimbursement.

“The (positive time reporting) people only amount to about $400-$450,000 per pay period,” McCann said. “We requested reimbursement for these people from the state, but the state hasn’t paid us at this point, so we’re pulling them out of the appropriated and putting them into the stimulus and backdating all that information so we can get our stimulus money.”

The employees being moved around for the stimulus funds are largely concentrated in maintenance and facilities.

“They’re never going to see a difference; it’s solely going to be a bookkeeping adjustment that we make,” McCann said. “It would have been much easier if they would have told us all of this back at the time.

It’s just a mess right now, and it’s a lot of paperwork that we’re going to have to accomplish in order to get that money pulled down.”

Sarah Ruholl can be reached at 581-7942 or at seruholl2@eiu.edu