Eitan Arom: USAC should employ students as accounting interns to aid funding distribution

If you’ve ever been to a culture fair, barbecue, speaking engagement, concert or social held by a student group, you were probably benefiting from money that flowed through the Undergraduate Students Association Council.

That body has the distinct privilege of handing out money to student groups that apply for funds, but how it distributes those funds can get rather confusing – especially for student leaders with limited financial knowledge and even more limited schedules.

To help with the task of filling out requisition forms, navigating line items and obtaining reimbursements, the undergraduate student government should deploy a team of student accountants to act as funding liaisons to campus groups.

A cadre of specifically trained students working under USAC, would not only help campus groups efficiently spend their allocations but would also serve as a link between those groups and the student government.

The office of the internal vice president already has a corps of students that act as liaisons to campus groups, but these students fall short of offering financial advice.

Somebody – or rather, a group of somebodies – should be responsible for walking student groups through the process of accessing and spending student funds.

Whether these students would work within the office of the internal vice president, the financial commissioner, the president or even student government accounting is secondary to the important role they would serve.

One of the central problems that USAC faces is an annual surplus composed of unspent funds from the previous year. Trained student accountants can even help mitigate this problem by assuring that less money goes unspent in the first place.

It should be noted that the Associated Students of UCLA, the umbrella organization that includes USAC, has made an active effort to streamline funding paperwork and train students how to navigate it.

However, students are less interested in learning how to fill out requisition forms than in putting on programming, said student union director Roy Champawat.

“You often hear about teaching people how to fish, but sometimes that’s pointless,” Champawat said. “Maybe (students) just need some fish.”

Instead of teaching each student leader how to access and utilize the myriad of funding sources, the undergraduate student government could save those leaders time and effort by insourcing that task to trained USAC interns.

Nicholus Warstadt, a third-year physiological sciences student and the chief financial officer for the Mobile Clinic Project at UCLA, said that his group would benefit from recommendations and advice regarding funds for which it is eligible.

He said that the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine approach Mobile Clinic with opportunities for extramural funding, and a similar service for resources within the campus community would be welcome.

Student leaders might be justified in worrying that having USAC interns do their accounting would be like having the Internal Revenue Service do their taxes. But as long as these interns are offering advice rather than issuing directives, the concern is not a relevant one.

Even when the different funds are arranged on a webpage with all their respective forms and guidelines, the application process is naturally complicated.

Student accountants could be schooled in what groups can or cannot buy with each fund. For example, the Student Organizations Operational Fund guidelines specifically forbid food, trophies, charms, candles, flowers, candles, picture frames, CDs and plaques.

Both Jacob Ashendorf, the budget review director, and Cynthia Jasso, finance committee chair, regularly hold funding workshops and meet with student leaders about how their money can be spent.

However, these meetings often come at a time when student leaders are not yet ready to spend the money that USAC has allocated them, said Patty Zimmerman, student government services manager.

These student accountants could collaborate with student groups throughout the period when they are accessing and spending their funds. Having student accountants on call would give campus organizations an entirely new level of funding literacy.

It has the ancillary benefit of giving a group of aspiring accountants and finance professionals both a valuable experience and a resume-booster.

When student groups have knowledgeable and capable advisors regarding the funds to which they have access, everybody benefits – from ordinary students who attend programs to the USAC officers who fund them.

Email Arom at darom@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion