The Undergraduate Council bounced about 90 checks to students, student groups and others in recent months, resulting in fines for insufficient funds, council leaders said this week.

Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 said the bounced checks, which were intended to pay off student grants and events such as Springfest, resulted from delays in the disbursement of council money by Harvard to the council’s Fleet checking account.

Council Secretary Jason L. Lurie ’05 wrote in an e-mail that the council would be fined more than $1,873 because of the checks. Mahan said that he did not know exactly how many people had been affected by the checks, or how much fine money the council had incurred.

“We go and request a check, we usually ask for $20,000, and then there is a two-week lag period where it is being processed by University Hall,” Mahan said. “We basically wrote checks on money we didn’t have.”

Mahan said that unusually high expenses at the end of the spring semester exacerbated the problem.

“At the end of the year we had all of these bills for [April’s Busta Rhymes concert], Springfest and grants and the lag time just killed us,” Mahan said.

Lurie was displeased by the bounced checks.

“Wasting $1873 in addition to students’ fees, which I’m told the UC will reimburse, in addition to the hassle this is causing for so many students, is a pretty big deal,” Lurie wrote.

Joshua A. Barro ’05—the former council treasurer and former council Finance Committee chair who ran against Mahan in the fall’s presidential election and later resigned from the council—said 93 checks had bounced in late May and early June. Each bounced check carries a $20 penalty in addition to other fees, he said.

Barro blamed council officers, rather than insufficient funds from the University, for the bad checks.

“In this case, they absolutely did have enough money to do [grant packages] properly,” Barro said. “They just didn’t have enough competence to do it properly.”

Lurie echoed Barro’s statements, citing poor management on the part of council officers.

“The account was overdrawn in large part of because of poor recordkeeping by the Council Treasurer and lack of oversight of the UC’s financial records by the other two individuals with check signing authority: Matt and [council Vice President Michael R. Blickstead ’05],” Lurie wrote.

Mahan acknowledged that the problem was due in part to miscommunication between him and council Treasurer Oulu Wang ’06, but added that he and Blickstead are currently working on reforming the system.

“We are going to request that the treasurer give us a printout of the Fleet account and we would then prohibit the treasurer from writing checks for money we don’t actually have in the account,” Mahan said.