Undergraduate student government officials are tightening their auditing policies to make sure student groups spend funds allocated to them more efficiently.
The Undergraduate Students Association Council Finance Committee will now require student groups who receive USAC contingency programming funding to report how they use the money, said Cynthia Jasso, chair of the Finance Committee.
The fund is an auxiliary source of funding which cannot be used as the main financial support for events.
The committee will be using evaluation forms to assess how funds are spent for student group events.
The Finance Committeefirst implemented a new formal auditing process last year afterit found that some student groups frequently did not spend all of the money that was allocated to them, leading to fund surpluses larger than $100,000.
However, Jasso said the audit process had no structure, which made proper evaluation difficult. Finance Committee members asked student groups for purchase receipts and discussed event efficiency with them, but the committee did not think it was effective because the process gave them limited information on how the groups spent their money.
“There was no system in place before. There were no evaluation forms,” Jasso said. “We didn’t have any protocols.”
The upgraded audit process is designed to better understand why and how student groups spend their funds, especially in relation to the caps that exist on how much money the Finance Committee can allocate to fund specific group expenses.
“I want to know whether these caps are efficient and whether we should change them,” she said.
This move by the committee has garnered favorable responses from some student groups. Tammy Rubin, the director of public affairs for Bruins for Israel, said she approves.
“I think it’s legitimate for any funding organization, whether in USAC or even any outside organizations, to know where and how their allocation is being used for the sake of transparency and accountability,” Rubin said.
Meet Bhagdev, president of the Engineering Society of UCLA, also said he feels that the audit upgrade is an economical and needed change.
“That’s a good idea because sometimes clubs just say they need the money and the events they hold are not as big a magnitude,” Bhagdev said.
Jasso said she hopes that the audit forms and evaluation process will allow the Finance Committee to provide student organizations with feedback and facilitate discussion about making their events more fiscally efficient.
“It’s a tool to improve our system and to hold student organizations accountable,” Jasso said. “It’s a tool that I think the committee should be using in the future years.”
Contributing reports from Amanda Schallert, Bruin senior staff.