Brian McNeil wrote:
A charity's treasurer is always a member of the
board. It is one of the
positions that is more you *must* have than more than *should* have. Where
you have a staff and noticeable amount of financial transactions to deal
with, the treasurer does not deal with these aspects. They employ someone on
staff to do the daily bookkeeping; either a Chief Accountant, or in more
Americanised terms, a Chief Financial Officer.
Exactly, He is preferably elected. Financial ability, though, is not
exactly prime sexy campaign material for an election campaign. Most of
the electorate tend to be very unsophisticated about such things. In a
board meeting a treasurer often needs to resist a board with great but
expensive idea. If the rest of the Board insists on disagreeing with
him, and overwhelms his one vote he must be ready to make his opposition
to fiscally irresponsible a matter of public record. In other issues he
is the equal of his fellow Board members.
Where no suitable is among those elected there is no choice but to
appoint for a limited term. If after a predetermined length of time he
fails to be confirmed by the membership in an election or other approval
process, a new person would need to be appointed.
WMF is bigger than that, at least in terms of the
amount of money involved.
The record-keeping requirements are also more complex. To deal with this you
need someone full-time. Being full-time it means on staff and paid to
perform work that the smaller operation only periodically needs an
accountant to do.
It's not only bigger, but more international than most large charities,
and that brings a whole new range of problems to the table. If a
European becomes treasurer he should not be required to travel to San
Francisco any more often than other Board members.
The position of treasurer on the board then becomes
more important, but -
hopefully - less onerous. Someone else is doing the daily bookkeeping and
you're in an executive position as treasurer. However, you need to know
enough to double-check the work of the CFO from time to time and give
intelligent advice on what priorities are. You also need to take the CFO's
work to the rest of the board. This is the hard work part of being
treasurer.
Yep. It's a matter of being able to ask the right questions of the
CFO. It's being sensitive to the questions being asked by the members.
Thus, in the wake of the most recent financial statements, it could mean
working with the CFO to find a way to divide travel expense according to
the underlying reason for those expenses, Board travel to meetings,
Wikimania, etc.
For these reasons you ideally need someone who has the
experience to fill
the CFO position, but actually just act as the executive above them. This
makes it very difficult to elect a suitable candidate and far more
appropriate to appoint one. Someone taken from the community would obviously
be preferred, but the pool of qualified candidates is small.
Not that small if you
don't make your requirements too high. Experience
need not mean an accountancy or business degree.
Ec