After AMS President Tanner Bokor refused his portion of the bonus awarded to executives and requested to not go through the evaluation process that comes along with awarding the money, Council voted to not allow him to skip the review.
The review, which looks at each of the executives' performance over the course of the year and determines what portion of the $5,000 bonus they receive, is conducted by members of the Oversight Committee and then reported back to Councillors.
Bokor said that during his last two years as an executive, he has stated that he would not be accepting his portion of the bonus money. However, after he started experiencing problems with his health earlier in the month, his medical team advised him not to go through with the review process.
"I explained very early on that I did not intend on taking any percentage of the funding to the Oversight Committee, however I did have an intention to go through the process of evaluation," said Bokor. "Unfortunately, there was a circumstance that arose regarding my own health where I was advised by my medical team that certain elements of the process would not be in my best medical interest.”
As a result, Bokor submitted a request to opt out of the review process to Council. At the April 8 meeting, Councillors voted to not allow Bokor to skip the evaluation on grounds that executives still needed to be held accountable for their performance and should not be able to opt out of it by refusing the money. Instead, Bokor will be going through a more sensitive review process.
Veronica Knott, chair of Oversight committee, confirmed that the committee will be going through the performance review without Bokor's involvement and will instead be looking at his goals on their own.
"Executives are only mandated to create goals for the year, but they’re not mandated to participate in any further evaluations,” said Knott. “Tanner can just hand in his goals, he’s not mandated to be a part of the rest of it, but Oversight is still mandated to evaluate.”
Knott also said that the committee will be providing a record of his performance to Council at the next meeting. Still, the information in the performance review will not be made public.
“With the goals, we can kind of evaluate his performance without him having to be a part of the process, which is really unfortunate because it’s obviously not ideal and it’s not really why the process is made, but in this case, I think it’s the best scenario for both Oversight and for Tanner,” said Knott.
Bokor said that he was not asking for special treatment, but rather acted upon the recommendations of his medical team. On a larger scale, he believes that performance reviews of executives are necessary, but feels that doing it through the PAI bonus is not the right way to go about it.
"I actually agreed with many comments stated around accountability and transparency," said Bokor. "I think it’s unfortunate, though, because PAI is actually not an accountable or transparent process to begin with, but I think we do owe a degree of making sure that students know what the executive have done.”