By Courtney Klaus, Editor- In- Chief
This year’s Student Government Association said it will stay on top of club funding by doing an end-of semester audit to ensure unused club funds go back into the SGA allocating budget.
Treasurer of SGA Kyle Mazza said although he will be doing more to review the budgets, the process of funding club events this year is essentially the same as it has always been.
Mazza said once a club funding request gets approved, the business office moves the money from the SGA allocating budget to the club account.
It is then the club’s responsibility to provide the business office with a receipt to be reimbursed. Mazza added that most club advisers have a Newman card they use when they buy things for clubs upfront.
SGA’s allocating budget is where club funding is transferred from and where the money goes back to if it does not get used. SGA started the year with an allocating budget of $12,700.
The official SGA budget report for the 2017-2018 academic year shows that, of the 24 passed bills that took money out of SGA’s allocating budget, only one event, the funding for flu shots in October 2017, showed revenue was collected back. All bills that were passed last year signed off on a clause that agreed to return any unused money back to the SGA account.
“It is the treasurer’s responsibility to audit all of the different club accounts, so if the treasurer fails to do so, that’s why the funding isn’t transferred from the club account back to SGA,” President of SGA Marisa Zayat said.
The treasurer for SGA has not conducted these audits since at least 2015.
Mazza said that he believes a full club funding audit had not been performed by the SGA treasurer in several years, and that he intends to do an audit at the end of each semester, which will help inform club treasurers of the actual balance in their account.
“That will help us get the money back into the student government account to do other things with. And that will also help us and every single club get a realistic balance on their account,” Mazza said.
Mazza also said, without an audit, there is a possibility that money could be sitting in clubs’ accounts that club treasurers do not know about. Mazza said that soon SGA will hold a club presidents’ meeting where the leaders of every club will learn more about how the funding process works so that they can have a better understanding of the funding system and can better keep track of money in their account.
“We are setting this process up so that this will happen every year and the students at the club presidents’ meeting will be very informed of how these processes work,” Mazza said. “The balances will be provided at the end of the semester so that they know... if they didn’t throw that $200 event, then we took it back because they didn’t use it for what it was intended for.”
