With growing calls to audit the IRS and audit the Fed, it seems a little off-priority to call for greater financial transparency in college athletics. Also, as a private organization, is the NCAA by itself a legitimate subject of federal legislation?

The proposed bill would require the NCAA to report its school-by-school revenue and expense data every year, and the Department of Education would make the reports available to all schools, including private ones.

Steve Berkowitz of USA Today has more:

House bill on financial reporting targets college sports

Congressional interest in college sports continued growing Monday evening, when two members of the House introduced a bill that would require wide-ranging, easily accessible financial reporting not only by schools, but also by the NCAA, conferences, bowl games and the new College Football Playoff.

The new bill essentially would result in the U.S. Department of Education making available for all schools — including private schools — the detailed, sport-by-sport revenue and expense data they report to the NCAA every year. The NCAA, which is shielded from open-records laws because it is a private, non-profit organization, does not make the figures available on a school-by-school basis in order to get private schools to participate in this reporting.

This is the third time in less than a year that a bill relating to college athletics has been introduced in Congress. The new bill also comes in the wake of a Senate committee hearing last week on a variety of college sports topics, including financial transparency, and a House committee hearing in May related to the effort to unionize scholarship football players at Northwestern.

Rep. David Price (D-N.C.) has titled his bill the Standardization of Collegiate Oversight of Revenues and Expenditures (SCORE) Act, and it is being co-sponsored by Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.). Petri is a senior member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, which could help the bill’s chances of getting committee consideration. That committee held the May hearing during which there was party-line disagreement about the prospect of college athletes’ unions, but bipartisan criticism of the NCAA’s and Division I schools’ approach to addressing athlete concerns that triggered the effort at Northwestern.