[CWG-Stewardship] Legal cost reality

[Kieren McCarthy]

Considering that the legal advice is being used to discern critical
decisions for the future of the entire organization, I find it a little
rich that the ICANN Board has made repeated comments about the cost of the
legal advice when ICANN's overall expenditure has ballooned in recent years.

Some facts that have been derived from analysis of ICANN's tax filings and
which ICANN has either not produced or not published:

* Average pay per staff member at ICANN in 2014 was over $187,000
* Excluding top exec pay, on average ICANN employees earned $169,000, up
$25,000 (10 per cent) since 2013
* ICANN’s top women are paid on average 35 per cent less than their male
counterparts
* Staff salaries are now 55 per cent of turnover (excluding gTLD income)
* ICANN’s travel spend rose by a staggering 85 per cent in 2014 to $17
million; 20 per cent of income
* Net profit margin (indicates effectiveness of financial controls),
declined from 15% in 2013 to -35% in 2014
* Return on capital invested decreased from 10% for 2009-2011 to -8% in
2014


If ICANN is concerned about spending over-run, the place it needs to look
first is at its own expenditure - these are costs that will continue until
they are reduced.

The legal costs for independent legal advice on deciding the IANA
transition and accountability changes will stop this financial year.


Kieren


On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 2:15 PM, Seun Ojedeji <seun.ojedeji at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I hope those who want to always push issues to external legal advice would
> appreciate the need to be strategic and prudent about this. Over 500,000USD
> already spent on Sidley is definitely not what we like ICANN to keep
> spending it's resources on.
>
> Regards
>
> sent from Google nexus 4
> kindly excuse brevity and typos.
>
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> CWG-Stewardship at icann.org
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>
>
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