The university’s finance officer, Brian Trott, made the claim after the university in recent months stopped releasing detailed financial reports, replacing them with a one-page summary.
"The intention behind the changes is to increase transparency - not reduce it."
The response has been criticised by Integrity Institute founding director Dr Bryce Edwards, a former lecturer at Otago University, as "outrageous" and "troubling".
"When public institutions are under financial pressure - as Otago clearly is - that is exactly the moment when transparency becomes even more important."
Dr Trott said the new reports provided a broader view of the university’s financial position, focusing on key indicators and trends.
While department-level detail was no longer included, the reports now contained clear summaries and insights about how the university was performing financially, he said.
"To put things into perspective, the financial information we make publicly available is consistent with, and in many cases goes beyond, what other universities provide."
He acknowledged it had been part of a new strategy of vice-chancellor Grant Robertson.
"The vice-chancellor has been transparent about the university’s financial position.
"This includes updates at all staff forums and individual divisional and departmental meetings. This also included a video for staff last year that discussed the budget for 2025. I also provide regular briefings and updates to staff."
A spokeswoman for the university said a copy of the budget would likely be provided soon.
The previous financial information included all the information in the one-page summaries, as well as department-by-department breakdowns.
Dr Edwards said the justification that the one-page financial reports were somehow more "transparent" because they were easier to understand "doesn’t wash".
He said the public, media and university community deserved access to the full picture: how each department was tracking, where capital was being spent, how scholarships were being managed, and what trade-offs were being made.
"Stripping this information out of the public domain severely undermines accountability."
He "strongly urged" the university leadership to reverse these reporting changes.
Otago University politics lecturer Dr Brian Roper said the university’s response to the ODT was "defensive" and "unconvincing".
He said if the university was going to provide only the "headline" summaries, then there should also be an easy way to access the more detailed information.
"If you look across the public sector, including at the government’s budgets, most of them have an executive summary at start, and then there is the more detailed information that follows.
"So, really, it would have been preferable if they wanted to improve the quality of the information to follow that format."
Communicating the fundamentals did not have to be mutually exclusive with providing the more detailed information that was made available in earlier reports, he said.
matthew.littlewood@odt.co.nz
