At 11:04 PM 17/11/2004, Margaret Wasserman wrote:
I have some comments on Section 5.3 of the IASA BCP, "Other ISOC Support".
The first paragraph of this section says:
Other ISOC support shall be based on the budget process as specified in Section 6. ISOC will deposit the yearly amount (as agreed to in approved budget) in equal portions. At a minimum such deposits will be made quarterly.
This seems unnecessarily restrictive.
Not at all - it seems to me to be entirely necessary and appropriate in these circumstances. The IASA needs to operate like any other enterprise - it needs to manage its cash flow, and manage its overall financial position. Your depiction of the financial position makes this more and more like an operational department of ISOC with all funding management placed under the control of ISOC. Frankly this is not what I understand ISOC offered the IETF. The use of forward planning and timed periodic payments according to a documented schedule of such regular payments allows the IASA and ISOC to understand in advance the scale of commitments in terms of the budgetary process for the entire year, as well as being able to manage cash flow based once more on the foreknowledge of the points of money transfer from ISOC to IASA.
The second paragraph in this section says:
If ISOC directly funds any other IETF expenses, such as the IETF share of ISOC's liability insurance premium, this will be documented together with the other IASA accounts.
I'm not really sure what this means...
It means that there are single payments to an external entity that are for services provided to both ISOC and the IETF< and in such case the document acknowledges that ISOC may undertake such payments (rather than the IASA) and in such cases the ISOC and IASA accounts would show the relevant apportionment of the payment.
There are some complexities to this budgeting process that aren't captured in this document, and I don't think that they should be. However, calling out one particular point (such as insurance) really begs the question of why other things that fall into this category are not called out.
I think that 'such as" is a valid way of indicating this as an example of such a payment. I would see this as conventional use of the english language in this context.
I would prefer that we simply delete this paragraph from the BCP.
I believe that this is a valid point of documenting instances where the asset transfer to IASA is not explicit, the reason why, and the proposed accounting procedure to address this.
Geoff
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