Event Costs-FIRST accounting

[sanddrag]

I don't have the data on how many teams compete at multiple events, but if you did some quick math on 3000 teams each paying a $5000 registration fee for their first regional, 400 teams paying $5000 for championship, and say 1000 teams paying $4000 for a second regional, that's $21 million.

Their 2013 financial audit report indicates a total program registration fee income of $19 million.

Now, I don't know how many people FIRST has on staff and but I could estimate salary and benefits costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million per year for a staff of 90ish.

What gets me is the FRC operating cost of over $33 million. What the report shows is that as much as we pay, that only covers about 50% of FIRST's costs, with approximately the other half being covered by grants.

So, to me, what the audit report looks like, is that it costs FIRST about $10,000 per team per year to operate this program. That seems rather costly for them.

One last note on the reason they want to keep $24 million cash on hand. It must provide great interest payments!