MSU releases audit of 2012/13 finances

The McMaster Students Union has released audits of its financial statements, showing the state of the union’s money from the past academic year.

The MSU, a multi-million dollar organization, is responsible for maintaining a number of services and organizations across campus, which is done through the accumulation of student fees from each full-time undergrad. It collects additional funds through its businesses, including Union Market and the Underground.

“KPMG combed through all the financials of the past twelve months,” explained MSU VP (Finance) Jeff Doucet of the process. The external auditing firm was called in, as part of standard procedure, to assess the organization’s financial health.

The audits were publicly released at the end of October and were put up for discussion at a meeting of the Student Representative Assembly on Nov. 3. Representatives took the opportunity to pick through the details of the reports, asking questions of the VP Finance before ultimately voting to approve the documents.

The MSU finished the 2012-13 academic year with a surplus of more than $300,000. While this represents only about three per cent of the MSU’s operating budget of $12,235,578, as a registered not-for-profit organization it is meant to be completely revenue neutral.

Doucet acknowledged the need for a plan for the extra money, as recommended by the external auditors.

“We need an actual capital growth plan. That’s a plan we don’t necessarily have right now,” he said.

While the organization as a whole ran a surplus for the year, certain services within the MSU saw a deficit in 2012-13, among them the Emergency First Response Team, the McMaster dental plan, and Compass Information Service.

Compass, for example, saw a drop in revenue of about $600,000 and ran an overall deficit of $30,486.

“GO Transit has moved to Presto cards, which is very convenient for students, but obviously it’s resulted in less revenue for Compass—when we sell tickets at Compass we’re earning a percentage of revenue,” explained Doucet.

On the other hand, McMaster’s campus radio station, CFMU, finished the year with a surplus of $193,785, a significant portion of the organization’s revenue, most of which comes from a portion of student fees. However, McMaster students voted in January 2013 to decrease the levy given to CFMU from $17.45 per student to $12.50, which is buy viagra soft tabs expected to eliminate the large surplus in future.

The results of the audit are publicly available, accessible on the MSU website.