Denver ? In another unseemly glimpse inside the Colorado football program, state auditors said Monday that former coach Gary Barnett’s offseason camp was such a bookkeeping mess they couldn’t be sure whether more than $400,000 worth of transactions broke any rules.

The long-awaited audit detailed three years of sloppy accounting within Barnett’s camp and cited repeated examples of financial carelessness inside the athletic department.

Missing paperwork, a lack of spending oversight, even a failure to check the criminal backgrounds of staff working with young campers — all of it points to a need for big changes, the auditors said in a 72-page report.

“The worst audit I’ve seen in my 11 years in office,” state Sen. Ron Tupa of Boulder said near the end of the two-hour hearing.

Indeed, there were many ugly aspects to the audit, but the report and the reactions to it illustrated the large disconnect between the political climate surrounding CU athletics and the realities of running a big-time football program with an annual budget of more than $36 million.

“I don’t know that Colorado is any worse than anywhere else, but it’s just that it’s gotten a lot of visibility,” said John DiBiaggio, a former university president who was hired by CU to look into its problems.

University President Hank Brown, who last week announced an overhaul of the school’s accounting and purchasing practices, agreed to each of the 15 recommendations for change proposed by the Legislative Audit Committee.

But Brown called the audit “a lot of smoke” without a smoking gun.

“Sadly, we’re probably better than most public entities, but clearly still not up to par,” said Brown, a former U.S. senator who has an accounting degree.

Barnett stepped down under pressure last week after his team lost three straight games by a combined score of 130-22. Athletic director Mike Bohn reiterated that Barnett’s departure was based on a combination of factors, but in no way timed with the release of the audit.

Like almost all coaches at big football schools, Barnett ran a football camp, earnings from which helped augment his salary and those of his assistants. But it came under scrutiny in the wake of the recruiting scandal that enveloped the university over the past few years.