Against Student Union policy, the Gargoyle Committee has spent $1,250 to buy ads in the Riverfront Times. This amount is 33 percent more than the Association of Latin American Students’ entire operating allocation for this semester.
SU policy for student group publicity clearly says, “SU will not fund ads in Student Life or other newspapers.” Though the Gargoyle Committee is an executive committee, it is subject to the same restrictions on expenditures as student groups.
Brian Nakash, the chair of SU’s Internal Audit Committee (IAC), said that he would investigate the matter.
The main contact for Gargoyle, Adam Wood, called this an honest mistake, and said that he was not aware of the policy when he took out the ads. He pledged to correct this error in the future by not paying for RFT ads with SU money.
A couple things are still troubling, like why Gargoyle’s treasurer, Athena Wong, referred questions regarding expenditures to Wood. As the treasurer, she is responsible for Gargoyle’s expenditures. Furthermore, she should have been familiar with SU policies regarding expenditures, and ensured that Gargoyle’s expenditures were in-line with those policies.
This underscores the need for SU’s IAC. Honest mistakes happen, and IAC should intercept unauthorized expenditures promptly; the goal is to catch inappropriate spending before the money is actually paid to the vendor.
And given the myriad of rules and policies relating to spending SU money, student group treasurers need to be fully aware of them to make sure their group’s spending is appropriate. If Wong authorized the RFT expenditures after treasurer training, perhaps this speaks to the ineffectiveness of the current treasurer’s training meetings.
The deeper problem, though, is that Gargoyle is publicizing its events to nonstudents. SU money should be spent on things that benefit the undergraduates on campus-it is their money, after all. There is no clear benefit to students from buying RFT ads in order to attract nonstudents to Gargoyle events. And the money SU spends on Gargoyle events is being misused if it’s primarily nonstudents that attend Gargoyle events.
On top of looking at the RFT expenditures, the IAC should evaluate whether the money SU gives to the Gargoyle Committee as a whole is being spent primarily for students’ benefit.