Students look for ways to eliminate unused funds
USC comptrollers work directly with student organizations with budgeting, funding requesting and the usage of allocated funds — but many students don’t even know they exist.
This year, the team of nine student comptrollers is working with Student Body Treasurer Ryan Harman to change this.
Some of them have even been on the other side of the process, so they know what problems currently exist.
“It was not a very helpful process. It was just very difficult to actually get information from [the comptrollers],” comptroller Sai Bikkani said. “That was just a bad experience and it made us try to do everything ourselves.”
In the past, student organizations were required to submit funding requests the semester before the event. This year there is a completely new funding system. All comptrollers have at least two office hours each week so that they are easier to contact and the comptrollers meet together more as a team, which has made them more unified than in the past.
“We really just want to get people in our office. We have a fair amount of emails, but we really don’t get them in the office,” comptroller Brianne Lucot said. “If they can come into our office and we can have a face-to-face conversation, it would make it all more efficient.”
For the first time, the comptrollers are splitting their plans into three groups: outreach, metrics and resources. After creating goals for the rest of this semester, they realized that almost all of their ambitions fell into these three categories.
“Very specifically what our goal to do right now is to create resources and knowledge so that the treasurer’s department as a whole becomes more effective and larger-reaching every single year,” said Sam Urh, Harman's chief of staff.
One of the main goals for this year is to organize the statistics of how the money is used by organizations and where exactly it is going.
They plan to publish the amount of money that is unused at the end of each semester along with this in the hope that student organizations realize the potential they have financially.
There is money left unused at the end of almost every semester, and many times the number left over is in the thousands.
“We don’t want you all to learn about it because it will make you a better human being, we want people to spend the money,” Harman said. “Customer service can always be together, but this is information that’s never been put together before.”
Since many student organizations don’t fully understand the money spending process, the comptrollers plan to advertise about their services and make appearances at events hosted by various student organizations.
The comptrollers are also working to ensure that student organizations have a positive experience once they do know where to look for funding. They are going to add a link to a comment and question form at the end of every email as well as send out an email to all organizations they worked with asking how their experience throughout the semester was.
This new process is a starting point for this team of students, and they hope that future comptrollers will build upon their system.
“We want to leave a legacy, and we want everyone after us to follow this same process,” comptroller Katee Driscoll said.