The Government of the Student Body wants to use some new-found wealth to benefit students.

A bank account GSB may have created more than 20 years ago was recently discovered by the Campus Organizations Accounting Office, and now GSB wants to put the money from the account toward student appreciation events.

Speaker of the Senate Henry Alliger said no one in GSB knew about the account, which contains nearly $3,000 — not even its secretary, Mary McBirnie, who has been with GSB for more than 15 years.

GSB members found out about the account because Frederiksen Court Senator Kyle Krause was interested in finding a way for GSB to make money off of the funds it keeps in reserve.

“I thought it was foolish to have this huge chunk of money just sitting there doing nothing, so I started looking for ways to try to make interest off of it,” Krause said. “Then I ran into this account that everyone apparently forgot about.”

A bill to be introduced at GSB’s Wednesday meeting calls for the re-identification of the account as the student appreciation account, and for funds from that account to be used for events such as the upcoming student appreciation tailgate. Therefore, the bill also recalls the $1,500 allocated to help fund the Oct. 30 tailgate at the game against Kansas.

“The $1,500 can still be put to good use in the senate discretionary account,” said Jason Carroll, vice chairman of the GSB finance committee. “Now we can just use these funds instead.”

The account was originally earmarked as a university investment account, which garnered it a higher percent of interest return on the money. As a way to continue to fund student appreciation events without having to spend student fee money, Carroll said, another bill will be introduced to call for GSB’s reserve budget to be placed in such a university investment account.

“This account will get us more interest, like the one we found,” Krause said.

Carroll said GSB keeps 10 percent — about $150,000 — of its yearly operating budget on reserve in case of emergencies.

This amount will yield about $3,000 a year in interest, enough to perpetually fund the student appreciation account for as long as the money is in the account, he said.