The National Tertiary Education Union wants James Cook University (JCU) to put its financial cards on the table for staff considering redundancy offers.

A recent Federal Government decision to cut $26 million in funding from JCU means some staff will have to go.

But the University says it will not know how many redundancies it can offer until it receives approvals from the Tax Office.

NTEU representative Peter Whalley Thompson says staff are waiting nervously to see the size of the cuts.

“They produced a paper which suggested that all staff would be noticed of offers of voluntary redundancies by the 7th of March, which is the end of this week,” he said.

“They haven't got an approval back from the tax office to offer those redundancies yet, so the time line has blown out.

“As you can imagine the anxiety is rising all the time for all of the staff.

Mr Thompson has suggested JCU make is financial records available to staff, so they can see the challenges the uni must face.

“They're treating all of the financial information of the university as commercial-in-confidence, now the last time I looked James Cook was a public institution and it was funded by public money and the so information about its finances should be made public on an ongoing basis not just in the accounts published in Parliament at the end of the year,” he said.