BATON ROUGE, La. -- At a time when Louisiana universities already are having to make budget cuts, some of them may have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back sales taxes on student meal plans.

LSU, for instance, may have to pay the state Department of Revenue $750,000 for three years of back taxes that campus leaders were completely unaware of until very recently, said Donna Torres, the school's associate vice chancellor for accounting.

"I was shocked," Torres said. "Now we have this huge tax bill we were told we weren't going to have."

State sales taxes that included student meal plans date at least until the 1980s, said Christina Loftus, Department of Revenue special assistant. But for years there was a specific exemption for the 4 percent sales taxes on student meal plans.

The Legislature, however, suspended that exemption several years ago and apparently no one noticed, Loftus said.

"The tax has been on the books for quite a while," Loftus said. "There's just been a misunderstanding on who was responsible."

Colleges will start charging the 4 percent sales tax on meal plans in January. They will get some relief when suspension of the exemptions ends June 30. Then, only a permanent 1 percent sales tax will exist.

At LSU, the sales tax will cost the average student meal plan an extra $37.50 for this coming spring semester, Torres said. But, it is impossible to track down students from previous years and make them pay the taxes that should have been collected, she said, so the universities may be liable for all that money.

Not all campuses feel the same way. The University of Louisiana System's officials are contending that the private, food service providers -- Aramark, Chartwells and Sodexo -- should be financially liable for the back taxes.

There are a lot of questions, said Nick Bruno, UL System vice president for business and finance, but UL System schools like the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Southeastern Louisiana University believe they do not owe the state.

"We're not the provider of the service," Bruno said. "We're not providing the food."

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)