Undergraduate student government officials plan to release a budget report Tuesday detailing how each undergraduate student government office has spent its money since August.
The report, launched by the Undergraduate Students Association Council Internal Vice President’s Office, breaks down certain funding information gathered from Student Government Accounting reports from Aug. 1 to March 8, as well as interviews with councilmembers – some of which happened about five months ago.
Because some Student Government Accounting reports have been updated since March 8 and some councilmember interviews took place months in the past, some of the information provided in the report is out of date or does not include clarifying details.
According to the report, USAC offices on average spent about 40 percent of the funds they have budgeted for the entire year between Aug.1 and March 8. The report breaks down each office’s budget individually and does not compare different office budgets with one another.
Diming Gong, the director of the Internal Vice President’s office Transparency Task Force and a second-year business economics student who helped compile the report, said she thinks it is difficult to compare different office budgets because some offices focus primarily on programming throughout the year and control hundreds of thousands of dollars, while others work within office budgets of a few thousand dollars.
When members of the Internal Vice President’s office initially started interviewing councilmembers about their office budgets in fall, they hoped to release the report at the end of the quarter. But concerns about the report creating a hierarchy between USAC offices and slate politics coming into play – combined with interview scheduling problems – delayed the process of collecting information for the report.
Additionally, Gong and Avinoam Baral, the Internal Vice President’s office chief of staff, took a few weeks to compile the report and create graphics to break down office budgets before it was released.
Baral, a third-year human biology and society student, said he thinks having similar budget reports come out each year would be helpful in better analyzing trends and increasing transparency in USAC spending.
He added that office members have not yet decided whether they will create a report documenting the rest of the year’s expenses.
Compiled by Amanda Schallert, Bruin senior staff.