It would be great if the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act reports actually disclosed real data.

That's the essence of a letter sent to Sally L. Stroup, assistant secretary for postsecondary education, by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA asked the U.S. Department of Education to change its reporting requirements for colleges so that reports published under the disclosure act could be independently audited and the data could be made comparable from one institution to the next.

If that sounds unbearably wonky, that's because it is. But reporters, researchers, and even the NCAA use the disclosure-act reports as financial statements for college athletics departments, despite the protests of athletics directors, who say accounting practices differ so much among their departments that looking at reports from two colleges means looking at two totally different sets of data.

The disclosure act was passed in 1994 as a way of determining whether colleges were doing right by female athletes. It requires colleges to report on the number of male and female athletes on varsity teams, as well as on the funds allocated for operating expenses, recruiting budgets, and athletics scholarships for men's and women's teams.

The law went into effect for the 1995-96 academic year, and The Chronicle has published elements of those reports every year since. The data are available at http://chronicle.com/stats/genderequity.

The NCAA asked Ms. Stroup to accept a common set of definitions for revenues and expenses in college sports proposed by the NCAA, the National Association of College and University Business Officers, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The association also wants her to require institutions to submit independently audited financial information, and to push back the deadline for filing the reports from October 15 to January 1 each year.

The intent is not to change any of the information directly related to gender equity, said James L. Isch, the NCAA's chief financial officer. "We want to collect in a reliable manner data that fully describes intercollegiate athletic programs, and we also want to collect key financial information that might be valuable to CEO's and campus decision makers as they look toward developing trends," he said.

All of the information would be made public, according to the NCAA's letter.

Ms. Stroup could not be reached for comment, but during a meeting of a federal commission discussing sports and gender equity last year she suggested that the government get rid of the disclosure-act requirements altogether.

Neither Mr. Isch nor Education Department officials could say when the new rules would take effect if they were adopted. But they could shine a much brighter light on how much money colleges are spending on their sports teams.