Development information - accounting and accountability (5)
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Dear Colleagues,
I appreciate the points made by Karen Hoehn. As some of you know I
spend a good few years as a corporate accountant, controller and CFO
before my career in "development" so I see accounting, accountancy
and accountability with somewhat more depth than many in "develop-
ment".
I like to think of controllership (in the USA, chief accountant in
some other places) as helping to get the organization to get to do
what its mission is in the best possible way. If it were driving a
Ferrari it would be using the steering wheel to go in the right di-
rection and the gas pedal to go as fast as possible...... and a brake
to stop or slow down in an emergency or difficult conditions. But
controllership and good accounting is about "going" and not "stop-
ping". Most people in development have the negative view of account-
ing because it is so much associated with "stopping".
Karen is absolutely right to raise the issue of measuring benefit. I
like the point made about outcome rather than just process. But I
want to highlight again the importance or relating outcome and costs
or costs and outcomes.
As many of you know I am not impressed with $50 million of develop-
ment resources that is used almost exclusively in the NORTH to study
the crisis in the SOUTH. I really do want to see us get a handle on
the quite massive amount of resource that does not do very much at
all in terms of any "outcome" that is real value in the crisis situa-
tion at hand. That is relating cost to outcome.
And I want to get a handle on the considerable (possibly enormous)
contribution that is being made by thousands or millions or ordinary
people as they do their best in the face of the crisis to help in any
way they can...... without much if any resource or help from "offi-
cial" sources. Here I am trying to understand outcome and associate
it with related cost of not very much. But I certainly want to see an
accounting for the outcomes which I believe to be of enormous value,
in spite of having low "official" cost.
When we have the proper system of accounting and accountability....
then we can push to get resource flows doing good things.
To Karen's point about refining the outcome measures.... I think this
should be an ongoing effort essentially for ever. The problem I am
grappling with at the moment is thinking through how this database
should be "organized" in terms of who should be doing it and how it
should be funded. While modern technology is amazingly cost effec-
tive, it is not "free" and the biggest costs are at the beginning. I
feel it is important that this database should NOT be funded by the
ODA community simply because of the tremendous importance of inde-
pendence. As a professionally trained Chartered Accountant I am ap-
palled by the accountancy profession's failure to understand the
critical nature of "independence" and the crisis this has precipi-
tated around failed audit assignments. This database on accounting
and accountability in development therefore should certainly be as
independent as it possibly can be.
But when the database is running, getting a very good handle on what
is getting done would be very important. And as Karen suggests, the
measure should respect the value and priority in the beneficiary com-
munities. There is quite a lot of good work on "benchmarks" done over
the years which can be used to start this aspect of the work. But it
still needs a database framework to be available.
Sincerely,
Peter Burgess
ATCnet in New York
Tel: +1-212-772-6918
Fax: +1-707-371-7805
mailto:peterb@iitc.safe-mail.net
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