Updated: May 23, 2025, at 6:51 p.m.

Current and former members of an outdoor adventure student organization claim GW has misallocated their revenue over the past three years, shortchanging the group by more than $80,000 in funds. 

Three GW TRAiLS leaders said they’ve had a yearslong back-and-forth with the University’s Office of Campus Recreation over a “coding error” in the organization’s management software that, since 2022, has placed $80,717 of participant fees from TRAiLS trips in a GW-operated account instead of TRAiLS’s, blocking the group’s access to the funds. Former TRAiLS President Thomas Broyles, who held the role during the 2024-25 academic year, said the funding loss will force the organization to lower its spending by tens of thousands of dollars next academic year, hampering its ability to host adventure trips, purchase outdoor gear and train guides. 

Broyles said officials told him the trip fees from the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years — amounting to about $56,000 — are permanently lost, as each academic year’s funds become unrecoverable after the fiscal year closes the following June, when the University’s accounting system resets revenue and expense accounts. After losing the 2022-23 funds, officials assured the organization’s leaders in May 2024 the problem wouldn’t persist the following year but walked back on the promise earlier this month, saying they were unable to recover the funds.

Roughly $24,000 of the nearly $30,000 in funds that TRAiLS made from trip participant fees during the 2024-25 academic year are in limbo, Broyles said. He said Campus Recreation staff told him they’re working with the Student Accounts Office to get the money to TRAiLS and pledged in January to begin depositing the funds into TRAiLS’s account. 

TRAiLS leaders said the University transferred $6,305 to their account last week, only accounting for trips in March and April 2025.

“We have tried to be diplomatic over the past year in working with the University to make sure these situations get rectified. We gave them a lot of leash,” Broyles said. “But now we’re at a point where it’s just no longer viable because they are just repeatedly going with the same narrative, and we are losing out.”

University spokesperson Julia Garbitt said TRAiLS has had a partnership with the Division for Student Affairs since the group’s inception, where DSA financially supported the organization through a “departmental budget allocation” along with funding the group receives from the Student Government Association and trip revenue. She said the groups have worked together to manage finances and will continue to do so.

“Throughout this partnership, Campus Recreation and the org finance office have worked collaboratively with the student organization to manage and discuss budget, expense and revenue considerations and will continue to do so in the coming semesters,” Garbitt said in an email.

Garbitt said TRAiLS’ trip revenues have not been “lost” by the University. She said University officials have fixed the coding procedure that led to discrepancies with TRAiLS’ finances.

“While there was an administrative oversight made in coding certain trip revenues among TRAiLS’s multiple accounts, the money has not been lost and has been utilized by the organization for operational needs,” Garbitt said.

She said if TRAiLS has further questions about finances, the University welcomes a conversation with org finance and TRAiLS to help the organization receive clarification about funds from previous academic years.

The funding hitch came as GW transitioned TRAiLS’s point of contact with the University from the Office of Student Life to the Office of Campus Recreation in spring 2022. TRAiLS leaders said subsequently, the University in spring 2023 overhauled how the group collects fees from students participating in their semester trips — on average $15 for day trips and $35 for overnights — from using management software ACTIVENet to SportEasy.

Broyles said with ACTIVENet, students paid for trips through the software’s portal, which would funnel the funds directly into TRAiLS’s account. But after they transitioned to SportEasy, Broyles said officials told him a “coding error” meant the revenue “disappears” into a GW account.

TRAiLS leaders said in spring 2024, they conducted an assessment of their finances after experiencing confusion associated with the transition to the Office of Campus Recreation and discovered that they didn’t have access to any of their trip revenue since the transition, about $40,000 at the time.

“Why the University is acting as a middleman is beyond us to begin with because it’s money that should go directly from participants to us,” Broyles said. “We then asked the big question of, ‘Why are we charging if the University is just going to hold that money hostage?’”

After discovering the discrepancy, Broyles said he and other TRAiLS leaders in May 2024 met with Erik Strouse, the associate director of health and wellness programs who served as TRAiLS’s acting advisor at the time, to raise the issue. Strouse told them that they couldn’t recover the 2022-23 revenue because the end of the fiscal year had passed but promised that the problem wouldn’t recur with the 2023-24 funds, Broyles said.

Earlier this month, Senior Outdoor Recreation Coordinator and TRAiLS advisor Lucy Puentes, a Campus Recreation staff member, told TRAiLS that the Office of the University Comptroller informed her that GW couldn’t transfer TRAiLS’s 2023-24 revenue because of an unspecified “financial error” on GW’s end, Broyles said.

“It’s a really sad and unfortunate situation,” Broyles said.

Broyles said he’s remained in constant communication with officials in Campus Recreation and the Student Accounts Office this academic year through email chains, calls and in-person meetings to ensure TRAiLS obtains its trip revenue, but is still unsure if officials will transfer the remaining funds since they’ve failed to in the past.

He said TRAiLS’s revenue fund, with reserves from previous years, has been depleted over the past two years, typically sitting at about $41,000 and now at about $9,000, prompting the group to need to slash about $33,000 in spending next academic year. TRAiLS leaders said the revenue fund serves as a “rainy day” fund to ensure the group has leeway to pay for its excursions and supplies.

He said the group is weighing cutting down on volunteer trips, costs for fee waivers for low-income participants, general body meetings, gear purchases, guide training and advanced trips that are longer than one night, as well as doubling the price the group charges students to attend trips.

Broyles said the trip revenue is one of three financial snags TRAiLS and the University have sparred over in the past year. 

TRAiLS has also lacked access this academic year to $26,000 of University-provided Campus Recreation funding for the group after officials deposited the money into the same Campus Recreation account that holds TRAiLS’s inaccessible trip revenue. He said officials called it a “financial mistake” months ago when TRAiLS asked them to transfer the funds.

Broyles said the $26,000 is in limbo and will zero out at the end of the fiscal year in June if not transferred, shortchanging the group again. University revenue and expense accounts zero out at the end of each fiscal year, according to the Office of the University Comptroller’s website. 

“We, just as an organization, have a net positive impact on the University. We track every single penny of our spending like literally down to the penny,” Broyles said. “But then we get screwed over by the University.”

He said last fall, officials requested that TRAiLS fork over $20,000 to cover the cost of Adventure Bound, a University-run pre-semester trip for incoming first-year students led by TRAiLS guides in which incoming first-years pay between $200 and $350 per trip, depending on the excursion. Broyles said the University, since 2002, has provided $30,000 to compensate for the trips and that officials in the Division of Student Affairs and Campus Recreation confirmed TRAiLS would receive the $30,000 ahead of the trips in June and July last year. 

After two months of fighting the $20,000 charge with DSA officials, including Assistant Vice Provost of Operations and Administration Giulietta Versiglia, Broyles said TRAiLS and the University compromised that the student organization would only pay $6,000 because he staunchly refused to pay the full amount. He said after the back-and-forth, officials told him the University won’t provide funding for Adventure Bound going forward.

“That situation ultimately ended up being resolved because I just refused to pay it,” Broyles said.

Garbitt declined to comment on why the University wanted TRAiLS to pay for the Adventure Bound program.

A TRAiLS guide with knowledge of the organization’s finances, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation from GW, said the University has eroded the trust it had built with TRAiLS by pushing the organization into financial uncertainty. The group is unsure if GW will return its $24,000 in 2024-25 trip revenue, making it difficult to plan next year’s budget and programming, the guide said.

“The University couldn’t follow through on that promise now for two years in a row,” the guide said. “We have to go about the budget, about budget decisions without confidence that they’re going to give us the revenue.”

The guide said TRAiLS is a selling point for GW among students who want a connection to the outdoors while at the University. The guide added that TRAiLS is the second-largest student organization with more than 1000 Engage members and hosts dozens of trips each semester, stretching the fallout of its financial strain to a slew of GW students.

“Even just this last year, we had 800 participants on our trips, we have almost 50 guides, we have more than 400 participants in our general body meetings,” the guide said. “If just one of those people decides that they’re not going to transfer because there’s a robust outdoor org at the University, the University makes its $30,000 investment back, just like that.”

Liz Harmetz, a former GW TRAiLS president who served during the 2023-24 academic year, said University staff turnover caused the group to cycle through five interim advisors from 2021 to 2024, who haven’t had the necessary time to help direct TRAiLS operations and help coordinate funding with the University. 

As a result, she said, TRAiLS didn’t have a clear grasp of its finances, causing confusion in revenue tracking and fund management during its transition to Campus Recreation and prolonging the time before students realized they lacked access to their own revenue.

“Do I think it’s an intentional slight against GW TRAiLS? No. Do I think that they’re not trying as hard as they could? Yes,” Harmetz said. “I think that they don’t see us, like the program itself, really as something that should be prioritized.”

This post has been updated to reflect the following:

This post has been updated to include comment from University spokesperson Julia Garbitt.