The schools wouldn't see this as an issue in their audit.

They're just being told that their PAC distributions are 34.6M and getting that, when it should actually be 34M. But the individual schools aren't looking through the payments to the conference to verify correctness there. This is an issue for the conference office. It's reasonable to expect schools to pay it back, given that they got the extra, but the poor accounting/oversight seems to have been at the conference level