Article
The Office for Students (OfS) has a rule about university accounts.
Originally posted on LinkedIn on January 23, 2026.
The Office for Students (OfS) has a rule about university accounts. A real one. Not a “best endeavours” one. Not a “when you get round to it” one. An actual condition of being on the register 📜. For English providers, the OfS accounts direction says audited financial statements must be published on the university website within two weeks of being signed, and in any case no later than five months after the year end. That is the deal 🤝. And yes, the OfS can sanction providers that do not comply ⚠️. Most universities have a 31 July year end. Five months later takes you neatly to 31 December 📅. So the intended rhythm is: July ends → finance teams add up the figures → auditors appear → governors sign → OfS receives → PDF is quietly buried in a hard-to-find corner of the website 🕳️ Job done ✅ Which is why, while updating my dataset with the newly published 2024–25 accounts, I assumed this would be a fairly dull administrative exercise 😴. It was not. Because a substantial number of reports are… not there 👀. And we are now only a few sleeps shy of February⏳. To be clear, most universities have published. Many have done exactly what the rule expects. But a lot — a lot — have not. Is that automatically a red flag? 🚩 Not necessarily. Accounts can be late for plenty of unglamorous reasons: audit bottlenecks, governance timetables, internal disorganisation, or a PDF marooned in someone’s inbox 📥. Some providers may have asked the OfS for an extension. But here is the awkward bit: the OfS does not publish a list of who has been granted an extension 🤐. So from the outside, you cannot tell whether a late set of accounts is “authorised lateness” or just… lateness. One missing report is a shrug 🤷. A pattern across the sector is harder to ignore. If we cannot see last year’s numbers, we cannot make calm, evidence-based judgements about what is happening this year 📊. We have to make do with panic and wild speculation. Transparency is not supposed to be a decorative extra, bolted on once the real work is finished. It is part of the system’s operating manual ⚙️. And at the moment, a noticeable chunk of the manual appears to have gone missing 📦. #HigherEducation #UniversityFinance #Governance #Transparency #OfS #UKHE