UC May Owe $12,000 for Shuttles

The Undergraduate Council (UC) may owe over $12,000 for two years of unpaid shuttle services, leading some council members to question the adequacy of past systems of financial record-keeping.

Crystal Transport, the company the UC hires to run its holiday shuttles, told UC Treasurer Faraz N.S. Munaim ’06 on Wednesday morning that the UC owes a total of $12,200 for services since Dec. 2003, Munaim said.

Munaim sent an e-mail over the UC open-list alerting UC members to the belated debt.

“The problem is that there were no proper receipts of money received from shuttle ticket sales (I believe some people still have the money on them!) and this is one of the reasons why it has been difficult to come up with a proper balance for the Committee Fund,” Munaim wrote in his e-mail.

Munaim said later he was not able to find records of the transactions caused the outstanding debt. He believed the UC was not at fault because it had never received an invoice from Crystal Transport.

But Munaim said Wednesday that the Committee Fund—which pays for activities hosted by the UC’s Campus Life Committee (CLC) including Movie Nights and shuttle service—was “in a bit of a mess.”

UC President Matthew J. Glazer ’06 said that the UC currently does not pay its bills until it has received invoices, and does not always keep records independently before it receives invoices.

Oulu Wang ’06, a former UC treasurer, said there is no guarantee that the UC would notice if they had not been charged for an expense, if not for the invoice and the examination of the budget at weekly meetings.

If businesses do not send invoices, Glazer agreed there is a chance that the UC would never notice if budgeted money was never used to pay a business that did not send an invoice, which was likely what happened with Crystal Transport.

Glazer said he is “outraged” that this year’s UC must pay for the oversights of a past council.

“We would be able to pay it and still have a successful semester, but it would be unfortunate if we had to pay it now because it’s a debt from two councils ago,” Glazer said.

“It seems strange,” said Glazer of the UC’s dependency on businesses’ submission of invoices for UC record keeping. “I want to change that and the process needs to be reformed.”

Glazer and Munaim said that after talking to Crystal Transport yesterday, they are not sure that they were ever sent the UC invoices for what was owed. Although $3,925 of the $12,200 debt to Crystal Transport is documented and has already been budgeted, Glazer said that the UC has no invoices on record for the rest of the two-year debt, and that Crystal Transport admitted it has undergone administrative changes and might have never sent them.

Crystal Transport did not return repeated calls yesterday.

Former UC Treasurer Clay T. Capp ’06 said that he encountered problems with the UC’s unstandardized records system when the Science Center refused to rent a room to the UC because of Movie Night debts, accrued by the Campus Life Committee (CLC).

“There needs to be defined expectations about what can be paid and what evidence is necessary for payment and how that is transmitted,” Capp said.

Munaim said he planned to meet with representatives from Crystal Transport either today or Monday to see if they can produce proof of the UC’s debt before he pays it.

The $12,200 will have to come out of the Committee Fund, which contained approximately $90,000 as of last week, Munaim said. “If we had to sign a check for $12,000 that would really hurt it,” Munaim said, but added that the UC would still be financially solvent.

—Staff writer Liz C. Goodwin can be reached at goodwin@fas.harvard.edu.