Hi Balazs,
This, while at first glance a credible idea, wouldn't work for a number of reasons:
- it misunderstands how major accounting firms work. Even if one accounting group carried out the work, the people doing the work would be the local accounting firms (eg KPMG Hungary, KPMG UK). These firms would have different methodologies and practices. - Some chapters, including WMUK, have a legal responsibility to be independent. Having someone else report our finances would jeopardise that independence. - Bigger chapters - and some smaller ones - already have established reporting procedures and practices, which in some cases are better than the WMF's systems. It would be extremely difficult to update our systems from our own, to WMF-led ones. - There would still be delays and errors in reporting - and the dates would still change because each country has different tax years (etc). - Every organisation measures things differently - we all have different cost centres, nominal codes, departments etc - having the WMF come in and change them would be very difficult and would run the risk of some organisations losing accuracy in their reporting (or would run the risk of having a massively complex system to account for everything). At its simplest level, definitions of things like "governance" or "office costs" vary from country to country. For example, in WMUK, we count general postage of letters as office costs, but items that fall under the Royal Mail definition of parcels instead come out of the budget for a project. If you're to have the same reporting for every country, you need to all be using the same definition of "parcel"! - Finally, every organisation's goals are different - and indeed our funding streams are different. WMUK is mostly funded from outside the movement, and as a result we are able to use our resources to fund non-Wikimedia projects - for example, OpenStreetMap, or OpenCorporates, if we wanted to. We can even fund political lobbying to a fair degree, which is something the WMF can't do as easily. This means that the WMF has no interest in counting that expenditure, because lobbying for open knowledge is not a WMF goal in the same way that it's a WMUK goal. It would be funded without using WMF funds, and would be spent on non-WMF goals.
Very complicated, and I'm sorry to write such a long email, but standardising financial systems across continents is a very difficult thing to do!
All the best,
Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992
Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).
*Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*
On 21 November 2014 11:38, Balázs Viczián balazs.viczian@wikimedia.hu wrote:
Hmm...I would love to *outsource *financial reporting to WMF together with a couple of other tasks as well (program evaluation for example).
Imo the best would be to contact our (that is WM Hungary) accountant directly so they can get the data organized as wanted, on time, with explanations requested, etc.
In long terms I would love to see a global contract with KPMG (as WMF is using them, or another of the big four) where KPMG (or an alternative firm if not present there) would take this task over from local chapters.
That would ensure that the data is collected the exact same way (with same definitions and methodology used) in every single country, without delays or errors in reporting and on the best dates for WMF.
Not to mention that it would decrease the workload of the chapters what I think barely if ever happened yet.
Balazs _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe