Date: 2025-05-01 Page is: DBtxt003.php bk009020600
ACTION INFORMATION FOR ALL OF SOCIETY
Metrics about the State, Progress and Performance of the Economy and Society
Metrics about Impact on People, Place, Planet and Profit
Chapter 2 - SYSTEMIC DYSFUNCTION
2-6 ACCOUNTING AND ACCOUNTABILITY
The reason for sidelining accountancy is quite simple ... most of the leadership of our global society favors a regime of minimal accountability that allows greed to flourish. The weaker the accounting, the easier this is to do.
The elite decision makers are more responsive to power and ideology than critical data based analysis and judgement:
“My mind's made up ... don't confuse me with facts”
This is a common mindset in corporate management and but it is also evident in politics and in society at large. This gets to be dangerous when there is also this:
“I know what I am doing ... and God forbid that anyone would try to hold me accountable!”
This is the environment that accounting and organized data about facts must operate in and be reliable. How it is done is very much a secondary issue. The data are neutral ... and they are about facts. Measuring facts may be difficult ... but accounting aims to have data about facts on the record. When you have data ... there can be analysis ... and reports ... and conclusions. And if there is organizational structure there can also be decisions and improved performance.
Fund flow analysis shows multiple problems.
The value dynamics in the relief and development industry are all wrong. This has been a chronic problem for a long time with the institutional leadership having little understanding or interest in the issues.
Fund flow misappropriation
Corruption
Value destruction
Negative multiplier
Big projects with high risk and low return
Planning and performance disconnect
Waste
A minimum of beneficiary impact
There is no system for doing development accounting and producing development performance reports. Instead of having a management information system that gives the performance information that is needed, the ORDA world does exercises that suggest that they are being responsible, but in fact does nothing to help them have control.
No use of value analysis methodologies
Value analysis methods have been used as long as I have known anything about accounting (more than 40 years). They became fashionable in the corporate financial analysis world in the mid-1990s with the promotion of the EVA methodology by Bear Sterns (to check this). But value analysis is missing from the ORDA world completely.
No management information
And nobody in the ORDA world uses management information. The ORDA process precludes management in the form that produces efficiency for the corporate world.