IUSA: A spending story

IUSA has moderate issues with mismanaging its funds.

To start, IUSA manages a budget of around half a million dollars (more than many small companies), although traditionally about 80 percent of that is given to on-campus organizations or pays for the Student Newspaper Readership Program (the program that provides free copies of the New York Times and the USA Today each weekday).

Because of this worthy tradition of funding our student organizations, IUSA effectively exerts direct control over just $80,000 to $100,000 of its overall budget each year. This segment of IUSA’s budget is called the “Operating Budget.”

This is where the potentially wasteful spending is occurring. Of the roughly $97,000 allocated to the Operating Budget this year, 49.1 percent is immediately allocated to IUSA itself. Some of this money is spent on reasonable things like the meager salary of Executive Board members, office supplies, photocopies, etc.

Other parts are a bit more iffy. For example, roughly $2,000 is set aside to buy parking passes for IUSA members, and a whopping 10 percent of the Operating Budget is spent on expensive advertising costs. During a 90-minute interview about IUSA with current Executive Board members, Student Body President Peter SerVaas said when there is not enough advertising, “it’s hard for students to know who we are and what we’re doing.” Wouldn’t they know what IUSA was if its members were doing a better job?

Overall, though, the current IUSA Administration has dramatically improved the budget situation.

While it did raise the overall Operating Budget by 15 percent, it has reduced a lot of the areas where spending was wasteful in previous administrations. (SerVaas falsely claimed in the debate last week that they lowered it by 40 percent. This is not quite a lie, but it’s not quite true either. The current administration eliminated about 40 percent of last year’s budget in wasteful spending and moved it to other more useful projects.)

For example, in the previous administration a single administrative assistant’s salary made up more than 30 percent of the total Operating Budget for all of IUSA. This year, the current administration eliminated that position and moved the money to places where it could be used more effectively, such as the campus Zipcar program.


E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu