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
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf