Luca Bisighini, Italian from AEGEE-Brescia, is a 27-year-old travel addict and weird, as he defines himself. He has an MBA with a specialisation in International Trade and Business and he currently lives in Krakow, Poland doing an internship. He joined AEGEE two years ago and he became active both on the local and European level. After being elected as the third member of the Audit Commission during Spring Agora Bergamo, he decided to go for a second term to finish and/or implement what has been started in this term, but he also wants to bring new ideas.
The AEGEEan: Why did you decide to run for a position in the Audit Commission again?
Luca: As I said in my application I promised it in Bergamo and I am not running away from my promises. Moreover, I liked this term as Audit and just five months seemed too short to me. I have ambitious plans and enough motivation to be a part of the Audit again. I want to continue working on plans for facilitating the life of Auditors in the future and give opportunities to lots of future students of economics.
According to you, what has been your biggest achievement in the Commission and what was the biggest of the entire Commission?
Personally I’d say getting more in touch with the finances of AEGEE, realising how locals behave by looking at the numbers, by what they present. This is fundamental if you want to set up criteria and make guidelines to allow people to analyse what locals are doing. I have been helped a lot by the previous two Audits who were in charge for a whole year: Mateusz Muszalski (AEGEE-Krakow) and especially Deborah Pistori (AEGEE-Cagliari), the spinal cord of this 2015/16 Audit Commission, God bless her. The biggest achievement of the Commission this Summer was to define our ideas more clearly and decide what we want to do together. We had some serious problems, but we solved them.
You seem to have a clear communication strategy in mind. Can you explain it, with a clear separation between internal communication and external communication?
First of all, during this term we had some kind of communication troubles within the Commission. I appreciate it to be among people who try to save the ship and lead it to safe waters. The issue I am referring to was mainly caused by continuous miscommunications. Also, during these months I had no opportunities to talk to any of the Job Shadowers. None of them showed up, which is kind of weird especially taking into consideration that in Bergamo I ran with one of them.
Actually I wasn’t leading the Audit, but this situation pissed me off (and I wasn’t the only one) due to the lack of basic organisation and leadership. Leadership is fundamental in the European bodies of AEGEE. If you are not a good leader, or a good organiser, well, you are wasting time. Because this was such a huge issue I mainly referred to an internal problem in answering your question.
We will implement the move to Podio, which I find fundamental to make this whole thing work. I would love to have a group of Job Shadowers: people eager and ready to be in a team, to learn lots of things and share their knowledge with me! That’s why we constantly need to be in touch with locals who are asking questions, with FATF, the CD, and the Medcom. Our credibility pass through our complete transparency, and precision in our work and in time.
Can you explain your idea about creating a set of criteria to analyse locals’ Financial Reports in more detail?
When I applied in Bergamo I already discussed my idea of making an Intertemporal Register of the finances of the locals. It’s something really basic in the world of accounting, and it is used to discover the right course of action in a multi-year period, to analyze risks, to prevent them by analysing economic behaviours, justifications to the numbers you see. We can do this for any kind of economic sector and for AEGEE branches too. We can even use these kinds of analyses within our locals.
If we will analyse the behaviours of different antennae, we can easily establish which ones are at risk, which ones are less at risk and we can find the things they have in common. By adding the international standards “ISO 19011:2011: guidelines for auditing management systems” in the process of our work we can make a professional jump that this body has never experienced before. We need a Task Force for this step forward, so we need more auditors – I hope at least two will join – and a lot of Job Shadowers who have to become like Subcommies for Netcoms. That’s why I am excited and eager to have a Task Force ready to work with me if I will be elected.
You put a lot of emphasis on educating locals. How would you implement this in an efficient way?
One of the things I want to do this year is to explain to every single local that made some kind of mistakes what it is they did wrong. Also, explaining in detail how to fill out a Financial Statement and how to do bookkeeping will be fundamental. It will be one of the first things to implement during the first months of the next term. From Chisinau to Enschede we need to do a lot of educating and talking to locals. We should also try to provide them with more unconventional and non-formal educational tools, even though I am sorry to say that economic education is usually pretty formal.
You mentioned that you will avoid “stealing problems” in locals. Not going too much into detail, why do you think this problem exists? Is it a big problem or is it limited to specific cases?
There are free-riders in our world in general, not just in AEGEE. There are people and locals who do not follow the main rules of the CIA or their own country’s national (and/or) European law. That’s absurd.
When I joined Audit I heard some vague stories from the past about “hey in this local XYZ ten years ago this happened”, or “this person used the locals’ money to buy the kitchen of his/her flat”. I mean, it might be funny at first, but it’s not funny in the end. Several antennae died due to debts, and were then born again like a Phoenix. Luckily it’s not a big problem, but we need to take clear and really serious actions to prevent this from happening again. Maybe we can propose some solutions at the Spring Agora in Enschede.
Currently you are Audit Commissioner, Coordinator of the Migration Interest Group, part of the Finance/Fundraising/Social Media team of Europe on Track and Subcommissioner of the Rainbow Area. Considering the workload of the Audit Commission, do you think that you are involved in too many projects? How would you be able to manage everything without neglecting any of your positions?
Anna Bortoletto from AEGEE-Udine asked me the same question in Bergamo, and I managed to find time to do each single thing in this term since then. Team work and effective, precise use of the tools and time we have is the answer. Even if it makes me sleep a few less hours, working for all these AEGEE projects is rewarding to me.
Lisa’s Subcommie Team this year was probably the strongest and the one that worked the most. I have no doubts about it. We made inquiries first, then we tried to improve a lot of the weaknesses we found. We discussed problems and areas where every single local can look for improvements, such as IT areas and ways to improve HR and recruitment. Next year, I’m certain a lot of antennae will adapt their strategies based on our advise.
The Finance Team of Europe on Track is something lot of antennae/projects in Europe should be jealous of. I love the project, it’s utterly brilliant and fascinating, but since this year’s edition it was troubled. I wanted to contribute with my expertise to make it work better, and make it more digital: an edition to remember.
The Migration interest group grew because of a series of events. We were able to exploit in such a great way: a great edition of the EPM, a really active Facebook group and in the end my Policy Paper on Migration were such great catalysts. We are growing and raising awareness on such a difficult topic. People in the group have great enthusiasm and a lot of creativity, attention, passion for the topic. I almost have goosebumps all the time, I am proud of every member of MIGR. And they represent the perfect AEGEE spirit I hope is alive in other groups and projects too. If I have to list one problem, I would say that I won’t have enough time to go to Brussels for the live meetings for all these projects. Of course, the Audit Commission will have the priority.
You have been very open about your plans in AEGEE. Would you push your ‘career’ further by running for CD in Enschede? If so, do you think this would be wise considering there are no other candidates for Audit as of now?
I am really grateful for having received so much positive feedback regarding my work, about what I do, and about what I say. 
I really think that this year I will work in the Audit in order to create something worth remembering which can facilitate and inspire a new generation of Auditors to have the kind of financial discussions we have been missing. With regard to my intentions toward running for CD, 2017 will just be a year devoted to the Audit Commission for me. I know more or less 20 people who are not in the CD now that might be new CD members in the very near future. I don’t know what my future holds, but, if something should change in my intentions: since I was born on June 18th and my name day is on October 18th and generally 18 is my favourite number … What about Luca, CD 20…18? [he smiles, ed.]. For now it is Luca, Audit Commission 2017, it sounds wonderful to me.
You can read his full candidature here.
Written by Erika Bettin, AEGEE-Verona