[Rt4-whois] Fwd: Additional budget details

[Smith, Bill]

Making the information available seems a very good thing. However…

With just a cursory review one might question the FY11 actuals:

  *   Ignoring overhead, 46% of Compliance spending is "other department allocation".  A significant amount.
  *   Travel has an overhead allocation of 36%. Why and for what purpose?
  *   Admin overhead is calculated at a surprising 119%.
  *   Other department allocation and overhead represent 57% of compliance spend.

It would also be helpful to know what is included in each category in order to  better understand if funds are being spent appropriately.

On the one hand I'm hesitant to include this information in our report without an opportunity to better understand the numbers and on the other, I was hoping we had concluded our work. Perhaps we could include a statement indicating that ICANN helpfully provided this information, but given that the RT had concluded its work, a thorough evaluation was not possible. We suggest that this information be provided much earlier in the next WHOIS Review cycle to enable the next RT to understand ICANN budgeting and to determine if Compliance funds are being spent appropriately.

From: Emily Taylor <emily at emilytaylor.eu<mailto:emily at emilytaylor.eu>>
Date: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 1:47 AM
To: "rt4-whois at icann.org<mailto:rt4-whois at icann.org>" <rt4-whois at icann.org<mailto:rt4-whois at icann.org>>
Subject: [Rt4-whois] Fwd: Additional budget details

Hi all

To clear up this loose end, I received additional information from Denise (below), which gives a little more detail on the way that the budgets are organised.  You may recall that rather than providing discrete budget lines for each department, ICANN appears to budget on a contribution basis, so that support functions (eg legal, finance, communications) have their spend distributed around the operational departments (new gTLDs, compliance).

The additional information came too late for analysis and inclusion in the final report, but my proposal is that we publish it as part of Appendix B, and include an announcement on the call for public comment which draws attention to the new item.

Any thoughts, objections?

Kind regards

Emily

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Denise Michel <denise.michel at icann.org<mailto:denise.michel at icann.org>>
Date: 8 May 2012 20:04
Subject: Additional budget details
To: Emily Taylor <emily at emilytaylor.eu<mailto:emily at emilytaylor.eu>>


Hi, Emily.

My apologies for the delay on these additional numbers. Attached is the FY11 Functional Report for the Compliance activities. The report includes aggregate numbers for the major expense categories we discussed -- Personnel, Travel, Professional Services and Administration. The report shows data for the FY11 Actual, the FY11 Budget, and the variance between the two. Note that approximately 5-10% of the following department budgets are used for compliance-related activities and are reflected in the attached as "Other dept. allocation":  Operations, IT, Legal, Registrar, Registry, Overhead.


If you have any question please let me know.

Regards,
Denise

Denise Michel
ICANN
Advisor to the President & CEO
denise.michel at icann.org<mailto:denise.michel at icann.org>
+1.408.429.3072<tel:%2B1.408.429.3072> mobile
+1.310.578.8632<tel:%2B1.310.578.8632> direct




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