Muddled MUSA accounts fixed.... for now

Financial systems which were incorrectly run at MUSA have been addressed by the current president. MUSA President Fatima Imran first mentioned dealing with problems with MUSA accounts at the last general meeting for MUSA. She told Massive these were related to authorisation, as the authorisers on the financials were staff which had left years ago and had not been updated since then. 

“Along with this, getting access to the bank account became an issue for myself and the Accounts Officer due to all the compliance work that needed to be done before hand,” Fatima said. 

Fatima says the responsibility for the failure, which extends back through several different MUSA administrations, lay with no one specifically. 

“There is no one specific to blame for this as this a collective step from both governance and operations that must be undertaken for the future of the organisation,” she says. 

She says there are no more pressing issues which need to be addressed with MUSA financial systems for now. “[All we have left to do is] create checks and balances to allow the finances for the association to be operating with the best practices (future planning [and] also future proofing).” 

MUSA has had historical issues with its financials, including the president’s credit card having the name of a president from two presidencies prior in 2019. Michael Salmon, MUSA President at the time, says there have been small issues which have built up over time at MUSA which hadn’t been addressed by previous executives or staff. 

“That’s just one small example of these issues that get overlooked or not addressed, and then it eventually falls to someone else to solve the issue, well past the point of people who were actually involved in it,” Michael said.