Graduation: How to protect money and avoid damage – 01/18/2023 – Education

Completing graduation with a party, family and friends is the dream of many students, but it became a problem for USP’s 106th medical class, which may have lost the R$ 920,000 gathered for the celebration. Alicia Duddy Muller Veiga, 25, is being investigated on suspicion of misappropriation of the fund, as well as embezzlement and money laundering, after trying to bet, without paying, a total of R$ 891,000 in Lotofácil tickets.

To avoid problems such as undue withdrawals or payments to suppliers without the consent of colleagues, professionals from the events and finance sectors heard by Sheet say that it is essential to create, at the beginning of the project, a statute with clear rules on the attribution of the graduation committee.

Responsibility for financial transactions must be delegated to at least two people, and investments must be low risk and operated by established institutions in the market.

In cases like the USP class, with 110 students and almost R$ 1 million collected, it is possible to adopt more complex structures to organize the commission, such as creating a non-profit association, with all graduates as members, eventually with the support of a lawyer to define the structure of the association and its duration.

From there, students will create, through the entity, a legal entity account also with responsibility for withdrawals and payments distributed to more than one person.

In smaller groups, it is possible to create a statute and record minutes with the signature of the people, a document that is already valid for hiring a company to manage the collection of money and that may or may not provide services such as photography, catering and music. The terms of what can and cannot be done must be clear in the contract.

In the case of trainees, the funds were under the responsibility of the company Ás Formaturas and would have been transferred to Alicia’s account. wanted by Sheet to say if the transfers took place and if they would have followed the rules of contract and statute, the company did not respond until the publication of the report.

An important factor, in the case of companies, is that the money is not mixed with resources for operations and personnel payments, according to Renato Menezes, founder of Viva Eventos. This prevents the resource from being lost if the company goes bankrupt.

“In our model, we structure an armored money system, we have three checks for any release of money, which does not mix. The money stays in a fund, in a collection account”, he says.

Using the money from a graduation for the operation of the company and the delivery of services already contracted is called leverage, says the president of Abeform, an association of graduation companies.

“If a company has a discordant budget, far below the market, it is necessary to turn on the warning signal. The company may need to deliver a party now and, to deliver its, it will need to close another contract”, says Michel Brucce, president of the association.

He says that the association’s idea is to promote business, map out where there are risks for those who have no party or no money and register suppliers to indicate with more security.

Another suggestion is, for those who will manage the account, be careful with investments and promises of earnings. This was one of the allegations made by Alicia, from USP. She stated, in a WhatsApp message, that she was the victim of fraud by a brokerage firm, Sentinel Bank, which did not respond to contacts in the report and whose website was deactivated in recent days.

Lucas Eduardo Tereska, responsible for the funds area at Manchester Investimentos, says that investments in cases of graduation commission should be conservative, such as CDBs (Bank Deposit Certificates), which are fixed income securities, with lower risk.

“If a proposal is too good to be true, it’s because it’s not true. When you talk about great expectations, a guaranteed return of 1% or 3% a month, it’s not possible to guarantee. It’s like the saying goes: if the handout is too much, the saint suspects.”

To provide security and transparency to graduates, the latest solutions bridge the gap between banks and students, bringing together a view of all transactions in the account for everyone in the group on a single platform.

According to Diogo Nemésio, president of the startup Sua Formatura, it is also possible to make the decision to authorize an expense random, to avoid cliques.

“When a student requests a transfer to pay a supplier, the platform randomly picks the people on the commission who will analyze and approve the expense”, he says. That way, there wouldn’t be the same people deciding on the different transactions.

If the options of creating an association or hiring a company to raise and manage graduation money are not viable, it is still possible to create a bank account and give view access, without the power to transact, to colleagues, restricting operations to the members of the commission.

“And then periodic meetings are held, with accountability, to say if there were those who did not pay that month and, if applicable, how much was invested”, says finance specialist Thiago Martello.