On December 2, 2020, the Student Government Association passed the “FinBoard Accountability, Communication, and Transparency (FACT) Amendment” to the SGA Bylaws, designed to increase transparency within the Finance Board’s (FB) allocations following complaints alleging bias in distributing funds. It passed two months later, on February 10, 2021.
I’ve spent the last several months investigating this policy. I’ve spoken to current and former FB members, current and former SGA members, drafters of the FACT Amendment, representatives of clubs who get their budgets from FB, and other people who have a stake in this. I’ve compiled common complaints and misconceptions and considered the accuracy of these, and gone through all relevant documents I can get my hands on. This is part one of a multi-part investigation, looking into both what the FACT Amendment is and its implementation. This first article will focus on the history of the amendment and its most common criticism.
The FACT Amendment was passed to ensure additional transparency in FB policy, and specifically Student Activity Fund (SAF) allocations. The SAF is a fund all students pay into as part of their tuition and fees, and it goes to fund things like club activities and events. According to Benjamin “Ben” Barber, who at the time was the president of SGA, it was passed to address a few concerns, including (but not limited to) clubs for minorities alleging discrimination, chronic overallocation of funding, and embezzlement. The hope was that if clubs were able to easily learn how their funds were determined, it would assuage concerns about discrimination; if people knew what went where, it would make more sense if they allocated less because you could see the division; and if there were discrepancies in what was allocated versus what was spent (or more specifically, what it was spent on), it would make it more obvious and easier to combat embezzlement. In this sense, the amendment was a tool to support FC objectives.
There are two major parts of the FACT Amendment: one about FB membership, and one about records and transparency. Membership is covered in Article VI, §4. Records and Transparency are covered in – depending on the reading of it – either Article VI, §6.4; Article VI, §4; or Article VI, §10. There is likely something to glean from how much care is placed here, but I digress.
Membership sets out a process for appointing and approving Finance Board Advisors (FBAs) and Senate Liaisons (SLs). FBAs, the people who work with clubs to ensure budgets, are nominated by a Finance Board Select Committee (FBSC), consisting of the chair (FB-C), vice-chair (FB-VC), and SLs, who are non-voting members meant to represent the interests of the Senate. They go through a recorded interview, with the recordings sent to the Senate and Judicial Board. SLs are nominated by the Senate Executive Vice President (EVP). In both cases, a simple majority of the Senate is needed to confirm them, and a confirmed FBA or SL serves for two semesters. Returning FBAs can forego the interview and go directly to a Senate vote. It also outlines the cases in which an FB member can leave or be removed from their post, including resignation, ineligibility (such as falling below academic standards), or discretionary conduct issues. Additionally, non-compliance with part two can warrant termination. In cases of conduct or non-compliance, a two-thirds majority of current FB members is required to terminate. Notably, an outside organization cannot remove someone from FB for non-compliance. Finally, the wording is unclear if these removal and resignation policies apply to the FB-C.
The second part is the core of what people commonly consider to be the FACT Amendment, as it goes through the actual transparency requirements. This is also the part of the amendment that tends to be the most controversial. Despite this, the plain language is fairly clear. All hearings are to be recorded in their entirety, though the FB-C can enter a “closed session” for up to 10 minutes. Reasonable measures, such as timestamped recordings or a visible clock, are to be used to ensure these sessions don’t exceed 10 minutes, and the FB-C must provide reasoning for why the session is needed; these can be challenged through the Judicial Board. These recordings are to be sent to the Senate Archivist, the Judicial Board, and the SGA website and/or YouTube channel. Under Illinois eavesdropping statutes, consent of parties is not needed for recordings, as, for legal purposes, the meetings are considered public. I’ll explain this further in a future article. Additionally, the full and unredacted ledger (used for recording budget requests) is to be shared on the SGA website. All other FB documents, such as notes, are to be made available to the Senate. Any “active student, administrator, staff, or officially recognized affiliate of [Illinois Tech]” has the right to be present at FB hearings, and upon request, FB is required to produce all above documentation to them within five business days. The FB-C should appoint an Archivist to handle this; in the absence of an Archivist, the FB-C is responsible for this.
Finally, there is one criticism that I often have heard leveled against the FACT Amendment, and I want to break this down early on, to make sure it gets addressed fully. When people bring up the FACT Amendment and a desire for increased enforcement, it’s very common to hear FB say they do not need to follow it, because it was passed by SGA without their knowledge or consent. However, this concern is both missing context and factually wrong.
So, for missing context, I went through the entire SGA Constitution and Bylaws to see if I can find rules about proposing amendments like this. As it turns out, this is entirely in keeping with all policies on policy amendments. The FACT Amendment is part of the Bylaws, and per the Constitution, “the SGA bylaws may be amended only by the Senate at any Senate meeting which meets quorum with a majority vote” (Article VIII). Per the Bylaws, “all decisions made by the [Finance] Board shall be in accordance with the principles and policies contained within the SGA Constitution, the SGA bylaws, and Finance Board policy, in this order of overriding authority” (Article IV, §2.7). The Senate has sole authority to amend the Bylaws, and FB is bound to follow these. Whether or not FB is a fan of this policy, this is how the Constitution is written. FB has no right to ignore policies purely because they did not have a hand in it.
But I wanted to know if they did have a say in this. The official authors of the FACT Amendment were Ryan Manthy, Shahaan Mirza, Isaiah Mays, and Keru Omad, as per draft and proposed amendments. However, according to Omad, it was Omad, “Ryan Shahaan Isaiah and Chloe [Rubinowicz] former fboard chair [sic]” who wrote the amendment. Manthy is a veteran FB member, so on its own suggests they had input. Rubinowicz was the FB-VC at the time of the amendment (and later was FB-C), so if she was involved, this would further corroborate FB’s involvement. I didn’t want to take Omad’s word for certain, though, without some additional evidence. As it happens, Barber still had a copy of the working draft of the FACT Amendment that I got access to. A lot of the edit history was unavailable, but some of the contemporaneous comments were preserved. One of them was a comment from Rubinowicz, left on November 30, 2020, that reads “My biggest concern with live streaming is privacy”. There is no live-streaming requirement in the copy of the FACT Amendment that passed. This implies that this was at one point proposed but was later removed. Rubinowicz, who was at the time FB-VC, raised a concern before it was read in the Senate and the areas of concern were not in the version that passed Senate. FB was involved in this amendment.
Again, this is meant to be a history of the FACT Amendment, with broad discussions about things like its current state and major critiques of it. Next week, I’ll dive into the implementation of the first part, SGA bylaws Article VI, §4: Membership.