Changes have been made this year to Associated Students Inc.’s (ASI) funding policy with the way they handle their finances and distribute money to organizations after numerous mistakes were made last year.

According to ASI Vice President of Finance Siddharth Menon, ASI spent roughly $90,000 last year when its budget for clubs and organizations was only $70,000, while this year only roughly $60,000 of the $90,000 budget has been spent.

ASI Executive Director Randy Saffold anticipates about $10,000 more to be spent before the quarter ends; this number does not include the additional $10,000 reserved for seed allocation.

“What led to it was we realized the finance committee financed everything that came in,” explained Saffold.

The former VP of Finance Georgina Arnold had addressed Saffold and explained that they would overshoot the budget by $20,000.

“Obviously someone wasn’t checking the numbers,” said Menon.

According to Saffold, ASI had a history of being lenient with money and people would appeal to the board and say they wanted to fund student activities.

“We found out a lot of it was not given properly or done the right way,” said Menon. “They were just handing out checks to anybody who showed up.

“They were violating a lot of their own policies, the committee chairs.”

To meet the extra $20,000 that was needed to fund the clubs and organizations, ASI would take money from other pools.

“We made different decisions; we cut back in some administrative areas and gave more money to student funding,” Saffold explained.

Saffold anticipates the budget going back closer to $70,000 next year and believes the spending was closer to that this year because they no longer funded coaches for clubs like Eclectic Pulse.

According to Menon, last year’s clubs would come to ASI and give a form with a budget for an event with all the necessary numbers, after ASI would meet with Student Life and a meeting would be scheduled and the clubs would describe the event and explain the logistics to the board.

Clubs would come after the event for which they received funding to get reimbursement, and would receive the checks two or three weeks after.

Club leaders found problems dealing with ASI because of the amount of time it took for them to handle everything.

“We’ve always had a problem with that,” said Vice President of Pilipino American Students Association (PASA) Francie Savangsy.

An order from the Chancellors office changed this.

“Luckily for us we had an executive order being released by the Chancellors office,” said Menon. “All that financial transactions that you’re doing right now is supposed to be the university’s job.”

Menon explained that the university now handles what he called the “money part” and ASI is no longer involved in any of the financial transactions, all the financial committee handles is saying yay or nay on events.

According to Menon, last year’s clubs and organizations would come to meetings with forms not completely filled out and would leave in the middle of the meetings to go get the final signatures needed to turn in the form to the finance committee.

To address these problems, Menon explained that he instilled a more disciplined two-deadline system in place winter and spring.

“We do pre-approvals,” he stated. “The committee works to make sure that if something is missing on your form before the meeting you get the call.”

There were concerns that students would not be able to make deadlines but those concerns were addressed quickly.

“An overwhelming majority of people were actually able to make those deadlines,” said Menon. “We’re doing 30 forms a week now, as opposed to doing five forms one week and then an insane amount the week after.”

Some, however, do not agree with the two-deadline policy; Eric Pinlac, VP of Finance hopeful for next academic year, also recognized the challenges with the system.

“With the current funding policy, there are two deadlines to submit requests; that setup is actually very difficult for student clubs — they have to act as soon as their event comes up,” he pointed out.

Pinlac advocates editing this aspect of the funding policy to be more in favor of the student organizations.

While ASI seems to have less work on their hands then before student leaders still dealt with issues this past year.

“We’ve had problems trying to get things approved and they even lost paperwork that we filed and we are having trouble trusting them,” said Savangsy.

Even with all the changes there is not much optimism from student leaders that dealing with ASI will become any easier.

“We’ll see what happens,” said Savangsy.

Anne Bartlett contributed to this report.