Functional Cost Reporting

["Gomes, Chuck" <cgomes@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following comments are my personal comments.
 
First of all, I applaud the intent to use the Dashboard to report
expenses in ways that clearly show how ICANN is spending funds on
activities related to the Operating Plan.  But the level of detail is at
such a high level in the case of expense reporting that it has limited
usefulness.  Whether the monthly dashboard is the right tool for showing
more detail of actual expenses versus budgeted expenses is open to
discussion but I believe there is a huge need to show it somewhere.  It
may not need to be reported monthly but I believe that it is critical
that the amount of spending in support of ICANN functional units be
publicly reported.  More specifically, I strongly suggest that support
costs (budgeted and actual) be regularly reported for each Supporting
Organization (SO) and Advisory Committee (AC).  At a minimum, this
information should be available during the operational plan and budget
development processes.
 
The transparency of expenditures in support of each of ICANN's SO's and
AC's is first of all important because it serves to communicate the
level of funding applied to each of those organizations; otherwise, it
is probably extremely unlikely that those organizations will have any
reasonable idea about the total costs associated with support for their
work.  Second, to the extent that expenses are broken out for each
functional organization, it allows the organizations themselves and the
broader community as a whole to evaluate the cost benefit of the various
services provided.  Third, functional reporting will allow for
comparisons of contributions by the various organizations to the costs
of supporting the organizations.
 
To the maximum extent possible, support for SO's should not be
subsidized by funds from other ICANN entities.  It is understandable
that AC's are in a different situation than SO's and that they are made
of registrants from the various SO's who pay ICANN fees indirectly
through both gTLD and ccTLD registries and registrars, but it is still
important that the full costs of supporting the AC's is transparent to
AC's themselves and to the community as a whole.
 
Chuck Gomes