[At-Large] Fwd: Re: [CCWG-ACCT] Transparency recap (Was: Contribution on Transparency Reforms for CCWG)

[Karl Auerbach]

On 10/30/2015 02:05 PM, gbruen at knujon.com wrote:

> And the financial obfuscation continues. Previous versions of the
> budget associated line item amounts with managers. This information
> has been removed from the current budget.

By-the-way when I dug through the ledgers I found nothing in them that 
would be embarrassing to anyone.  There were flaws and errors - but 
merely of the kind typical to any small, new business.

There were some odd things - for example even through one of the excuses 
that was given was that ICANN had an expert go over the books and assure 
them that things were OK, it turned out that when we started to dig we 
noticed that an entire ledger was missing.  That so-called "expert" 
kinda missed that rather major error.  (When printed out the missing 
ledger alone was a stack of paper perhaps 80cm high.)  It was an 
innocent mistake, and ICANN scurried about and found the missing 
materials, but it did reflect a rather troublesome level of credulity on 
the part of the members of the board of directors.

You may find it interesting to read the public version of my final 
report to ICANN's board of directors:

http://www.cavebear.com/archive/icann-board/icann-evaluation-public-version.pdf

(I just re-skimmed that note; it is amusing that at that time I 
expressed a concern that ICANN's employee roster was approaching 30 
people and that the budget could reach $10million.  Today those numbers 
have not only been exceeded, but exceeded by a full order of decimal 
magnitude.

		--karl--