[Osmf-talk] Beta Volunteer Auditor sought for OSMF

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    I mentioned in November last year ("Financial Oversight") that I'm
planning to have OSMF financial records cross-checked by a volunteer
auditor.

This plan has now matured to a point where it has the support of the
full board, and I am actually looking for someone to do the job,

This is not a permanent position - you basically volunteer for doing it
once, for the 2015 business year, within the next few months, and that's
it. After that, we'll think about how to continue - whether we'll elect
someone to do it on a longer-term basis, or what.

There's no money to be earned, just fame.

The volunteer auditor will:

* Sign an NDA about not releasing any detailed information to third
parties outside of their final report. (They can of course write a blog
entry that says "today I went through OSMF's Paypal statements" but they
cannot reveal details about what was in them.)

* Receive copies of all 2015 bank statements, invoices, expense reports,
and so on. This is likely to be an iterative process because I don't
have everything nicely wrapped up in a zip file, I'll have to work with
the auditor and dig up everything.

* Receive detailed exports/reports from our accountant.

* Check everything and satisfy themselves that no inappropriate payments
have been made, and hat everything is properly documented and accounted
for. There is a large degree of freedom here for the accounant to decide
just how precisely they want to check - do they really want to repeat
the whole accounting work or just skim the records for unusual payments,
etc.

* Write a report to the membership that (hopefully) says everything is
correct, or if there are problems, document them appropriately, and
publish the report here and/or during the reporting session the next
general meeting.

Ideally, the volunteer auditor will also document their process and be
available for advice when the 2016 audit is performed, so that we can
achieve some continuity.

To be clear, the official 2015 annual report is prepared by our
accountant and sent to the financial authorities; this is a not a
process in which the volunteer auditor is involved. The volunteer
auditor reports to our members. Some things that are totally ok for the
financial authorities (OSMF buys Porsche as a company car for treasurer,
with proper invoice and paperwork) but might not be for the membership
;) This also means that there is no requirement to know anything about
the UK tax or companies law (of course a general idea about bookkeeping
helps).

Last time when I mentioned this, I had two people email me in private
saying: "If you don't find anyone else, I'm prepared to do the job". I'm
a bit uncomfortable with selecting someone myself. Perhaps those who are
interested in the job can just reply to this on-list and write a few
lines of "application" (why interested, previous experience...), and
then if there should be more than one person, people can just +1 their
favourite candidate right here on the list?

As I said, in the future maybe we can do a proper election but for 2015
we're somewhat in a beta phase with this ;)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"