Date: 2024-04-23 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021501
KAZAKHSTAN
EXPLAINING THE 2021 PROTEST
ThePrint ... Kazakhstan eruption, why Russia is rushing troops & why it matters for the world
EXPLAINING THE 2021 PROTEST
ThePrint ... Kazakhstan eruption, why Russia is rushing troops & why it matters for the world
Burgess COMMENTARY
I did a consulting assignment in Kazhakstan in 1995 some time after the Soviet Union had imploded. The purpose of the consultancy was to assist the Kazhak government to reform its financial management so that it would become more in line with American practice rather than Soviet practice. At the time I was working with KPMG Policy Economics Group (recently renamed the Barents Group) on a project that was funded by the World Bank.
There were hundreds of Western consultants in Almaty working on a variety of projects and to be brutally frank, very few of these consultants had much relevant competence. I had some advantage in that when I was training with Cooper Brothers to qualify as a Chartered Accountant in London one of the projects that I had worked on was to help compile a draft analysis of all the accounting and tax systems around the world including the Soviet Union. Three decades later this work gave me a good starting point.
During the Soviet era the record keeping associated with government accounting in its sphere of influence was absolutely meticulous. In my experience countries that were once part of the British Empire or had been under French colonial rule had reasonable accounting systems. This all contrasts with American government accounting which has a surprising level of dysfunction with rather little effective accountability much of which is enabled by what is essentially corrupt legislation. My immediate impression upon arriving in Almaty was the Kazhak government accounting was totally Soviet in its structure and style ... the record keeping was meticulous but the actual reporting from these very good records quite useless.
To my surprise I found that the Government accounts in Kazakhstan had been incorporated into a FoxPro database system. In the early 1990s FoxPro had the best performing PC level database system and the Kazhak government were doing their routine internal government reporting using an instance of the FoxPro system. As it happened, For some time, I had also been using an instance of the FoxPro database for my own government analysis work (mainly via UNDP) so I set about organizing the various accounting reports of the Kazakh government so that they would print in either English or Russian.
Many people liked this level of transparency, but quite a few did not. A surprisingly large number of the Western 'experts' did not like this step towards accountability at all nor some of the 'higher ups' in the Kazhak government who had a variety of roles in gaming the system to their advantage. When it was time for me to return to the USA for a vacation break, it was requested (demanded) that I did not come back to Kazakhstan. It is no surprise that decades later the country has an enormously high level of high level corruption. The foundation for all of this started immediately after the Soviet implosion ... in large part enabled by Western consulting incompetence.
Peter Burgess
323,844 views
Jan 6, 2022
ThePrint
1.78M subscribers
#CutTheClutter #KazakhstanProtests #Russia
Kazakhstan has erupted in violent protests throughout the country. Shekhar Gupta traces the reasons behind these protests, which are a product of anger over the years. And why does it concern Putin's Russia more than any other country. Episode 913 of CutTheClutter
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