We want to provide more context to our recent post about suing the University of Regina. URSU does not want to use student fees to engage in legal battles. Our preference is to negotiate with the University of Regina rather than having both parties spend money on legal fees. In this particular case, however, URSU has no choice but to do so to ensure that there is still student representation on campus. We want to emphasize that the University has not articulated a plan for ensuring student representation on campus and has suggested they’ll work with another student union even while no other competing Student Unions or Student Associations have yet formed.
Many students have asked why URSU is not pursuing fraud charges. We again have to note that we do not have evidence that fraud has been committed. Many students are informed by anonymous social media accounts that present criticisms under the guise of asking questions, but those accounts are often wrong about important and basic facts like names, roles, relationships, timelines, dollar amounts, and how URSU works. As an example of a recent spurious rumour, the 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe that URSU bought from Taylor Motors in 2022 is not missing, it’s not registered in another province, it’s sitting in the University of Regina parking lot right now. Part of this misinformation is due to our own lack of communication and transparency with our members, which we commit to improving, but we also encourage our members to ask what evidence is being provided for claims that they read about.
Some students have asked why URSU hasn’t committed to a forensic audit. As a reminder, URSU receives a fiscal audit every year, which involves auditors reviewing a sample of transactions. A forensic audit, on the other hand, would review every transaction and the chain of reasoning to support that transaction. In preliminary explorations about forensic audits, URSU was quoted a cost of between $200,000-$300,000 for each year that would have to be forensically audited. This means that URSU would have to spend another $1M-$1.5M on top of the millions of dollars of losses from 2021-2024 with no guarantee that we will learn anything new. Given our delicate financial position, this does not seem prudent.
We will be taking some time this summer to explain how URSU lost the money it did and what changes we’re implementing to avoid similar losses in the future. However, we recognize that some community members may have more information available than we do. Next week, URSU will start an Audit committee whose job is to collect and do preliminary research on any claims of fraud that are supported by evidence. If that Audit process turns up anything that we can act on, we will do so, and the results of the committee’s work will be provided to our members when it is completed by August 31st, 2025.
From The URSU Executive Committee
