Harvard To Audit UC Finances

Harvard’s internal risk management services will audit the Undergraduate Council this semester to critique the organization’s current financial practices and to ensure appropriate use of funds.

The University’s Risk Management and Audit Services conduct the examination of the UC every three years in a process that takes about three months. In that vein, this year’s audit did not spring from any circumstantial conditions or allegations of poor fiscal discipline, according to UC Vice President Eric N. Hysen ’11.

“We don’t expect this to be that controversial of an issue,” Hysen said. “I think it’s nice to have to make sure our financial practices are sound.”

In the UC’s last audit in 2007, the RMAS deemed the organization’s financial procedures “inadequate”—the result of a variety of “high and medium risk issues” that could have led to fraud or misappropriation of funds, according to UC Treasurer Brad M. Paraszczak ’11.

Fiscal management practices that sparked concern included the UC’s failure to co-sign checks, retain documents in an organized and systematic fashion, and store files off-site in the event of damage. Another noted deficiency in the 2007 audit was the lack of a memorandum to guide the transition period between outgoing and elected treasurers, according to Paraszczak.

“We have eliminated every problem [from 2007],” he said. “We are trying to express as earnestly as we can how far we’ve come in terms of being transparent and having a system that students can trust.”

Throughout the auditing process, the Finance Committee will focus on ensuring the maintenance of proper documentation and the systematized organization of receipts for every grant issued by the UC, according to FiCom Chair Amanda Lu ’11.

The majority of the UC’s funds—which are primarily from the optional $75 activities fee included on undergraduate term bills every year—go toward funding student group grants, according to Lu. She said that the UC awarded over 1,200 of these grants last year, amounting to about $500,000 in total allocated funds.

The UC is currently funding an unprecedented number of self-initiated projects, Paraszczak said, pointing to recent initiatives such as UC TKTS, which raffles free tickets for campus and local events to the student body, and UC Cameras, which makes camcorders available to undergraduates for personal use.

—Staff writer Janie M. Tankard can be reached at jtankard@fas.harvard.edu.