“Yes, I think that is a small — that’s a mistake,” said AMS VP Finance Lucia Liang at a February 24 Council meeting.
“I wouldn’t call that small,” said science representative Ray Hua. “That’s $120,000.”
At the meeting, Hua had found that a duplication error resulted in a $128,033.40 overstatement in non-discretionary allocations in the AMS’s January budget reforecast. The amount represents just over 0.5 per cent of the $22.9 million total non-discretionary allocations, which is fee money that the AMS can only put toward specific purposes set out for each fee.
The weekend before the Council meeting, Hua decided to familiarize himself with the budget documents since he had only joined Council in February. While reading over the budget reforecast, Hua saw that the Sustainable Food Access Fee, Indigenous Student Fund and Get Thrifty Fund budget lines were included twice.
“I asked around and it seemed like that wasn’t supposed to be the case, so I brought it up at council,” said Hua.
Liang acknowledged at the meeting that this was a mistake.
“Upon further investigation, this duplication was just a residual error from staff formatting of the AMS Budget that was missed in vetting by me and Finance Committee,” she said in an email to The Ubyssey after the meeting.
These are the rows that were summed twice. pic.twitter.com/hjqmRglnMM
— andrew ha 何錦富 (@aandrewha) February 25, 2021
The duplications appear in both September and January budget reforecasts, suggesting that Liang’s office had missed them in at least two rounds of vetting over the course of six months before presenting to Council. No councillors brought up the error in fall 2020 budget presentations.
Liang said that the error represents a small portion of the budget and doesn’t change the validity of budget projections. The AMS is currently forecasted to have a $666,415 deficit.
“While the extra $128,000 does change the bottom line shown in the budget, this does not impact our confidence in the accuracy of our projections for this fiscal year,” said Liang.
Council approved the budget reforecast with the error corrected.
“I don’t want to put the blame onto any one particular person. Especially for councillors, I believe there’s kind of an expectation that what you receive in the presentations and the materials that executives bring to Council are accurate, honest, and … [the] full picture,” said Hua.
“To be clear, I’m not saying the VP finance is entirely at fault here, but just the broad finance organization of the AMS could have taken more care in preparing the documents.”