Lay Auditor Report (authored by Nikolay Voronov and Mike Gill, additional notes by Noam Kuzar):
On the Lay Auditors work:
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We created a Wire chat for the PPI Finances, involving the lay auditors and the treasurer, right after the last GA. That chat sadly died nearly immediately after its creation, with no communication there since January 2024. Maybe we don’t need that chat or maybe Wire is not a convenient way for us to communicate; I suppose that’s a matter for the newly elected lay auditors to decide. We would strongly suggest though a line of communication of this kind should be opened.
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Access to the email account for auditors (layauditors@pp-international.net) wasn’t provided; we are not sure if we need it and what was the original purpose of that account as mentioned on the Wiki here:
https://wiki.pp-international.net/wiki/index.php?title=Lay_Auditors
It should either be deleted from the Wiki or put to some use. At the moment our attempts to contact that address failed and the mailbox doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
On the PPI finances in 2024:
We contacted Bastian and got a response that all information about bank accounts for 2024 is currently updated on the Wiki:
https://wiki.pp-international.net/wiki/index.php?title=Finances#2024
https://wiki.pp-international.net/wiki/index.php?title=Finances#Paypal_(current_account)
Bastian is ready to provide access to the bank statements and access to the secure folder with the account documents, which would certainly be useful for the lay auditors’ oversight. The new lay auditors should definitely request access immediately upon election.
As for the 2024 finances as posted on Wiki, we see no problem and approve. Though we would like to suggest the PPI (especially the Board) should try to be more in touch with the members and attempt to increase the revenue, at least as far as the membership fees go. Collecting the fees from just two member parties over the course of a year is not exactly a good sign for the organisation, nor a very sustainable source of income.
Proposals:
To improve the functioning of the Lay Auditors’ team in the future, we would like to propose to elect the Lay Auditors for a longer period (2 years) to improve their effectiveness and automatically grant them access to the bank statements, paypal account etc. at the start of their term. We think these two changes have the potential to improve the oversight.
We also wish to suggest to the board approveal of a financial plan or goals for the following year, so the Board and Lay Auditors can audit whether the goals were achieved.
In addition, we suggest contacting the bank and requesting a lowering of the bank fees if that wasn’t done yet. Also, it could be beneficial to edit the donations page and allow donations via PayPal in any currency, not just CHF.