The Ithaca College Student Government Association announced Feb. 17 that due to a bookkeeping error regarding how much money was available in the Student Activities Fund, it will no longer be able to allocate funds to student organizations this semester.

Senior Brandon Xing, vice president of business and finance, said he doesn’t have any evidence as to where the error came from.

Xing said the time frame for when the SGA usually allocates all of its funds need not be examined. “The money runs out when it runs out. It is independent of yearly time schedules,” he said. “There are so many factors changing how much money is allocated that a direct comparison of dates wouldn’t show the whole picture.”

Even so, this situation negatively affected student organizations. Those organizations that had not submitted their budget requests prior to the fund’s depletion will not be able to obtain money from the fund. Naturally there will come a point every year when all of the available funds have been allocated, but to come up short from the promised or expected amount by $2,000 with no explanation is unacceptable, and the SGA and the Office of Student Engagement and Multicultural Affairs must determine how this error happened and ensure it doesn’t happen again. The SGA should not take this lightly, because although there may be various factors that affect when money is allocated, the amount of money available should never be in question.