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...
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 would prefer that we simply delete this
paragraph from the BCP.
Hi Margaret -
I think the point here was not to single out insurance but
to say that the IETF would like to see what is known in
accounting circles as a "full allocation". That means that
some attempt is made in the books to allocate general
expenses (such as "insurance") among various programs.
An alternative accounting model is simply to calculate overhead
(e.g., unallocated expenses) and use some metric (e.g., total
expenses by "pillar" or "activity") to do the allocation.
That's kind of what we have today (of $2m in revenues, $600k
is lumped into the "overhead" category).
I think what the paragraph in the bcp intended to say is
the former not the latter.
It does seem likely to me that there will be a single ISOC D&O
insurance policy and that the costs of that policy will be allocated
to the ISOC standards pillar as part of the overhead. But, I don't
understand the point of calling out this particular expense as
something special... There are other costs (such as paying a
qualified accountant to figure these things out) that will also fall
into this category.
Might it read better something like this?
In the case of additional direct expenditures by ISOC which benefit
the IETF and other activities, ISOC shall attempt to
allocate such expenses by activity, allowing IASA to gain an
accurate view of the true cost of support activities.
And, to the accountants: "don't lump all general expenses
into a g&a budget line: at least attempt to break stuff out by
program if it makes sense to do such an allocation."
Regards,
Carl
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