After five years without updating its fiscal plan, the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) now has less than a month to submit a revised version and secure final approval, as required by the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMB). The compressed timeline comes amid a governance crisis marked by the removal of five of its 11 chancellors, student strikes at three campuses and calls from sectors of the university community for Zayira Jordán Conde to resign or be removed as president.

In a March 6 letter to Gov. Jenniffer González Colón, the FOMB gave the university two weeks to submit a revised draft of its 2021 fiscal plan. The institution missed the March 24 deadline and requested an extension until April 15, according to remarks by the university president at the most recent meeting of the UPR’s Governing Board.

Still, after saying it had “carefully evaluated the request,” the FOMB rejected that date and ordered the university to submit the draft by April 8, according to a letter that Robert F. Mujica, the board’s executive director, sent to the governor on Monday, March 30. The deadline for final approval remains May 1, Mujica wrote.

The FOMB recommends annual reviews of fiscal plans for Puerto Rico government entities, a practice several agencies have adopted in recent years. Public corporations such as the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, the Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority, the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company and the Municipal Revenue Collection Center, among others, have updated their plans nearly every year and already have 2025 versions. The central government’s fiscal plan was also revised in 2025, while the UPR’s has not been updated since 2021, even though it had been reviewed annually since 2019.

The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo(CPI) asked Mujica what prompted the FOMB to require the UPR to update its fiscal plan now and why it had not done so in previous years, but did not receive a response by publication time.

William Muñiz, a faculty representative and member of the UPR’s Governing Board Financial Affairs Committee, told the CPI that the deadline the FOMB gave the university to update its fiscal plan is tight and that an expedited drafting process could affect how much funding the institution receives from the government.

Fiscal plans required by the FOMB typically include austerity measures or targets for the release of contingent funds tied to compliance with structural or corrective reforms, including eliminating budget deficits, providing adequate pension funding and implementing controls that have at times fueled tensions between the board and public agencies.

If the FOMB determines that the revised plan does not meet the requirements of the federal PROMESA law, it is “required” to draft and submit its own plan to the governor and the Legislature, and that version is automatically deemed approved.

“What concerns me is that several issues are being handled at once, and something could end up being poorly planned, like the budget, which is extremely important. I’m concerned that the fiscal plan reviewed by the FOMB will also affect how much funding the university can receive from the government,” Muñiz added.

He said he expects the fiscal plan submitted by the president to win the backing of the Governing Board’s Financial Affairs Committee because most of its five members were appointed by La Fortaleza, the governor’s office, and are more closely aligned with the FOMB’s vision, with the exception of Muñiz and undergraduate student representative Benjamín Rivera Meléndez. The other members include attorney Enrique Guzmán Matos, representing Francisco Domenech, executive director of the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority, or AAFAF, and who, according to the professor, “sets the tone for the committee.”

For the UPR, the FOMB’s plans amount to a straitjacket because they make the release of funds contingent on meeting milestones focused primarily on administrative restructuring and cuts. For example, for the 2025 budget, the FOMB conditioned the release of $102 million on compliance with a series of academic innovation, operational sustainability and financial sustainability requirements included in its fiscal plan. Of that amount, $40 million in budgeted funds was withheld pending pension reform for employees in the system, worth $20 million, and the implementation of a pilot program to consolidate administrative operations at the Aguadilla, Arecibo and Utuado campuses, also worth $20 million, as part of those compliance milestones.

Since being selected as UPR president, Jordán Conde has emphasized that the FOMB’s fiscal plan is part of the roadmap for her administration of the university system. In an interview with the CPI in July of last year, she said she would align the university’s strategic plan, the fiscal plan approved by the FOMB and the governor’s governing platform.

“We have to bring all those plans together, including the so-called milestones agreed to with the FOMB to access additional funds. And, all of those are goals the university should have imposed on itself long ago. They are goals aimed at increasing revenue and generating operational savings so the institution can function within the budget we have,” she said at the time.

Julio Cabral Corrada, a sports events entrepreneur and CEO of Grupo VRDG who was appointed to the UPR Governing Board by the governor in August 2025, voiced concern during the board’s meeting that its members still do not know what specific measures the university will present to the FOMB to address the institution’s structural deficit of nearly $700 million. Cabral Corrada previously worked for Morgan Stanley and helped with Puerto Rico government junk bond issuances in 2014. He later joined the team at Stone Lion Capital, a vulture fund that acquired more than $30 million in Puerto Rico government debt.

“Just for the record, this Governing Board is considering concerns about a structural deficit of roughly $700 million. I think it would be helpful if, to the extent possible, by the next meeting we have a detailed explanation of the measures that will be taken to tackle that deficit,” he said as he questioned Laura Ortiz, the Central Administration’s finance director, at the board’s most recent meeting.

Ortiz said only that “we are working on updating the most critical aspects of the 2021 Fiscal Plan, in collaboration with AAFAF and our internal team,” without detailing the specific mechanisms the university presidency is considering to address the deficit.

In response to Cabral Corrada’s repeated questioning, President Jordán Conde stepped in to say that “this will be addressed in the updated Fiscal Plan.”

“I think this Governing Board has been discussing this for a long time, and what I am doing is safeguarding sound public governance from a fiscally responsible standpoint. I want to know because, too often, the press, the students and the broader university community expect services to be delivered, and we keep kicking the can down the road. I am trying to understand the structural deficit, what is being done to address it, and whether the FOMB is supporting that fiscal analysis, because as far as I know, the numbers in the Fiscal Plan have not been updated in recent years,” said Cabral Corrada, whose company VRDG has received more than $7.8 million in sponsorship contracts during the current administration from the Puerto Rico Tourism Company and the Department of Economic Development and Commerce (DDEC, in Spanish), through Global Holdings LLC.

What the FOMB is demanding

For the revision of the 2021 Fiscal Plan and the budget for fiscal year 2026-27, the FOMB is requiring UPR to update data on student admissions and tuition revenue, broken down by undergraduate and graduate programs, including figures for full-time and part-time students across its 11 campuses. The FOMB is also asking for projections of how many students the university expects to admit for the 2027 academic year.

The institution must also submit a report on current and projected revenue, as well as its funding sources, including the distribution of Pell Grants by campus and federal research grants.

The university must also update, “in detail,” figures for payroll across the university system and related costs, including Social Security, Medicare, unemployment and disability insurance, workers’ compensation, employer pension contributions and other benefits tied to each employee’s monthly and annual salary. It must provide payroll data for fiscal years 2024, 2025 and 2026, as well as projected staffing levels by category — faculty, administrative and nonteaching personnel — including expected hires for next year.

As for its debt, the UPR will have to submit an updated breakdown of what it owes, including how much corresponds to principal, interest and the total amount of its bond debt. The CPI confirmed that part of this information had already been disclosed in the university’s 2025 audited financial statements.

The FOMB also requested a projection of expenses for fiscal year 2027, specifying whether those costs are recurring or nonrecurring and identifying the revenue source that would cover them. The UPR must detail any planned initiatives that could affect expenses, including their scope, implementation timeline and estimated financial impact. Finally, the FOMB is requiring information on cost-saving measures, whether already implemented or still projected, and their expected budgetary impact.

With the Holy Week holidays in between and five campuses under interim chancellors, the UPR has less than six days to deliver exhaustive and precise information, including “Excel files with the full calculations, an explanation of the methodology used, and the key assumptions underlying the projections.”

As part of the cuts imposed on the UPR by the FOMB in 2017, “the formula” established under Act 2 of 1966 was eliminated. That formula guaranteed the university 9.6% of the Puerto Rico government’s General Fund. An analysis by the Center for a New Economy, published in 2021, found that after the formula was eliminated, the university’s General Fund allocation fell from $911 million in 2017 to $466 million in 2022 — a reduction of nearly half, or 49%, of its budget. For fiscal year 2025-26, the government’s contribution to the university stood at about $441 million.

This story is possible through a collaboration between the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and Open Campus.

This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.