Neither Martinak or Haas were aware how transferring the funds would effect various ASMSU services to students, such as blue books and legal services.

Haas said the process of moving the funds to on-campus accounts is being suggested after issues were discovered through internal and external audits.

“In addition to external auditors seeing there were problems, the internal auditors who review ASMSU also had problems,” Haas said. “The issue was that ASMSU was not taking steps to follow their own procedures as far as money concerns.”

The dispute about the group’s funds was not related to recent problems with the cancelled Ne-Yo concert, Haas said.

Haas added MSU is not looking to turn ASMSU into a university department or control how the organization conducts business with its funding.

“They’re not being asked to be an MSU department, they are being asked to follow all of the same rules that people in the university are asked to do,” he said of the allocations that have been made. “They are receiving $1.5 million in tax revenue, that’s a lot of money, and all we’re asking them to do is to follow the procedures in place.” At press time, Haas could not be more specific about which procedures ASMSU failed to follow.

Martinak was surprised to hear the funds had been frozen since April 5 and said the group has been working under regular financial operations.

He said the organization is mainly funded by the $18 per student per semester tax, which adds up to a grand total revenue of $1.5 million.

Without the student tax revenue, ASMSU will use their emergency funds created for situations such as this. Vice President for Student Funding Mike Mozina said the organization has around $500,000 and can last about nine months without the student tax.

Martinak said the university is allowed to withhold student tax funding from the organization because they are the ones originally collecting it.

“They collect the money, it goes through the university accounts and that’s how they can stop it,” Martinak said. “It’s sort of like the gray area of a policy.”

The ASMSU general assembly elected to turn down a bill at last Thursday’s meeting, which would have moved all of its funds to a university financial system.

ASMSU general assembly member Nate Pasmanter, similar to nearly all of the representatives, voted against the bill last week because he is worried what the organization would become if the funds were moved.

“Frankly, I don’t think the university should be responsible for ASMSU funding,” Pasmanter said.
“I don’t trust them to handle the money appropriately and that it would give them a huge amount of leverage over us on who to fund and what to cut.”