ANUSA Treasurer Dashveen Jose confirmed in his report to the Student Representative Council’s (SRC) third meeting of 2019, that the $153,219 that was absent from ANUSA’s 2018 mid-year SSAF allocation had been recovered from the ANU. Dashveen outlined that he “asked them [ANU] nicely about it, and they gave it to us.”

 The missing amount was flagged during the previous SRC meeting and Jose affirmed that the discrepancy was discovered during a regulation auditing process undertaken earlier this year.

In regards to the cause of the missing funding, Dashveen outlined that “at that point of the year (surrounding the mid-year SSAF period), the financial controller had like almost left, so he was the person responsible. So once he left, it got swept under the rug.” Dashveen confirmed that ANUSA had finalised and lodged the request for the 2018 mid-year SSAF funding, but that the email chain “died off”.

When asked if the discovery of the missing funds opened the potential for other financial errors, Dashveen asserted that “so far nothing has come up, so I don’t think so at the moment.” He further asserted that if other errors were to be found, “we’ll be there, we’ll make sure it’s all figured out, and ask people nicely.”

SRC 3 additionally raised issues surrounding the scheduled auditing of ANUSA’s affiliated departments. Dashveen highlighted in his report that “department audits have been delayed and will not be undertaken this year.” He said that the departments failed to provide all of the requested documents, and as a result the audit was unable to “form an opinion due to limitations (lack of requisite documents)”.

Dashveen described these documents as “essential”, but outlined that “all we can really do is to say to the departments is to please have all these documents ready for next year”. When questioned, Dashveen described that his main strategy to ensure that such a situation is not repeated next year centres around respective departments submitting monthly financial updates to ANUSA.

Dashveen’s report additionally confirmed that Friday Night Party and O-Week, generated $37,369.47 and $18,332.89 in profit respectively. Dashveen outlined that the relevant profits will not be redistributed, but instead placed back in ANUSA’s reserves.

However, these profits again raised concerns over the presence of both a significant profit and controversy surrounding insignificant services such as toilets and food vendors at Friday Night Party. In response, Social Officer Matthew Mottola, said that he would “prefer that we had a really successful Friday Night Party, where there were no lines, we had more than two food vendors and a $10 profit”. Despite this, Matthew still referred to the ANUSA run event as “successful”.