 Hello, my name is Harry Neufalk and I've been asked by the bridge facilitators to provide you with some of my insights from three and a half decades of dealing with election finances. I think the first thing I wanted to point out is that there's often a lot of concern raised about the independence of an election management body and my experience is not all election management bodies or EMBs, as we like to call them, are financially independent, even though most that I've worked with have been legally independent. There's two sides to the coin of independence. Obviously, there's the whole issue of legal independence, the idea that executive government does not control the actions and decisions of the EMB, but the flip side of the coin is accountability. And my experience is that even in jurisdictions that have full legal and financial independence, there is a requirement for a heightened level of accountability. And most jurisdictions that have the combination of legal and financial independence are required to go through a full financial audit every year. Thank you. Hi, it's Harry Neufalk again. One of the other things that I wanted to chat about was that for an EMB that's working through the process of getting a budget pulled together and approved, accounting practices matter. Accounting is one of those dark sciences that only a few people have the stomach to actually go into, but it's very important that the principles behind the accounting practices be understood by the people who are preparing the budget and who are going to have to account for the moneys once the budget is approved. Generally, my experience is that government moneys, and it's almost always the case that an EMB is dealing with public funds, have an accounting practice that involves standard objects of expenditure, and these are often referred to as STOBs. And doesn't really work as an acronym, but my experience as well is that standard objects of expenditure don't have a lot of meaning when it comes to defending your budget or looking in the past to see what things cost last time. So in addition to doing a standard object of expenditure budget, there's a requirement to break it out and present it as a budget for discrete activities that are in support of an election or whatever the activities might be in the fiscal year that leads up to an election or follows an election. There's a best practice that's developed with the election management bodies around the globe that separates out ongoing administrative costs, and these are the things like having a headquarters office and score staff, telephones on their desks, desks to sit at, chairs, maybe centralized computer systems, janitorial services, that sort of thing that are costs that are going to be incurred year after year, whether there's an election or some other electoral event or not. And to also have a separate category for event funding. And events might be an election or a by-election or a referendum or a plebiscite or even something like a redistribution of boundaries for the purposes of changing an electoral man. And you want to know what this cost last time and frequently when you're defending a budget, it's very important to know that the costs for the last event were X, and this event is going to cost a bit more because of inflation or a bit less because of our reduced requirements. But to have a comparison point, it's very important that when budgets are prepared that it's be very clear what an event cost and what the component costs were within an event. Likewise, ongoing costs are going to be pretty much the same from year to year. There may be some growth if there's an expansion of the mandate for the EMB, but they tend to be the same kind of costs year over year with adjustments for inflation and so on. On the topic of accounting matters, there's the whole issue of dealing with Stoves which probably government accounting will require there be a classification of all expected expenses into standard categories. There is the whole concept of dealing with ongoing versus event funding. What is going to be the requirement for the ongoing operation that doesn't change very much, whether or not there's an election or any other event, and what is the event cost going to be in the coming fiscal year, even if it's in the preparation for an event. But it gets tricky because you're going to sometimes have projects and it's not going to be clear whether the project is for the ongoing operations of the EMB or for a particular event or for multiple events. Like a new computer system might cost millions of dollars and is it going to be an expense for the election? Is it going to be an expense for multiple elections? And this is where government accounting rules and things like amortization become very important. You need to know these these rules before you start creating your budget because the effect of how they are dealt with on things like cruel can cause nasty surprises if you don't know about it. I sometimes get asked about what the best budgeting approach is for an EMB and there are people who advocate a top-down approach. That is you figure out what things cost the last time, be it the election, the enumeration, a referendum and you factor in things like inflation, additional requirements in the legislation, in a large electorate, and you come up with a figure relatively quickly that is defended on the basis of, well, it costs us this much last time and these are the additional factors which are well justified that are going to increase the costs. That's one way of doing it. Another is to do what's called bottom-up and this is far more work and it's very necessary if you haven't got a history of accounting for your electoral events and what their costs were. Bottom-up really requires that each section of an EMB sit down and work through what they expect the cost will be for each aspect of what delivering an election or other type of electoral event is going to cost and having a defensible budget for their responsibilities and that's all rolled up by generally the accounting folks in the organization and so you get a number, a bottom-line number of what the budgetary needs are for an EMB either way. Which one's better? I personally think you need to do both. Senior management should be doing a top-down budget exercise. Supporting management, middle management and supervisors should be working from the ground up on figuring out what the real costs are and then there should be a discussion in the middle about who's right and which factors were forgotten and is there additional things that were in the bottom-up exercise that were not taken into account on the top-down or vice versa. My experience is doing both ultimately provides the most defensible budget. A budget presentation to whoever the holders of the purse strings are is often a very critical component in success or not success in getting the budget that's required for an EMB. My experience in having led some EMBs is that it's a really good idea to do a dry run of the presentation that you're going to to do and to involve your management staff in that exercise. Typically, if it's a legislative committee or a treasury board or some other type of tribunal or other organization, they'll set out a set format as to what can be expected. My experience is that normally you're expected to submit a written budget with details on all your figures and justification of why you require this budget you've submitted and that's sent in to whatever the group is that's going to be doing the review and a few days or a few weeks later you're asked to come in and do a verbal presentation. This verbal presentation is really, really important and it can make or break whether or not the EMB it's what it's it's requesting and I suggest that this written presentation be distributed to all members of management and then all members of management are expected to meet and go through a dry run where they get to be the people asking the questions and they're the ones who are reacting to comments made in the overview. Typically, the leader of the EMB is asked to give five, ten or fifteen minute description of the budget request and then it gets opened up for questions which can often run for 45 minutes, even as long as two hours and that's where it's really interesting and I've had great experience with allowing managers to role play being really, really hard-nosed protectors of the public purse and asking the hard questions. I found as well that there are inevitably much harder coming from management in the EMB than they are from whoever makes the decisions ultimately. Many years ago, I was working in the Electoral Commission of Guyana when they were going through a particularly challenging set of elections and there was a sign on the wall which I've never forgotten and it said failing to plan is planning to fail and this whole idea of elections being about planning has been something that's been repeated throughout my career. I believe very much that election management bodies are a perfect place to have continuous planning going on and for a real culture of planning to be a feature of the organization. A budget, after all, is just another aspect of planning. It's getting to the details of what it's going to take to deliver on goals and objectives and strategies that have been chosen by the organization and what resources are going to be required in order to actually deliver the things that are desired and needed. There's an old adage that if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there and that if you're too busy to plan, you're not managing, you're just reacting. I believe that very much election management bodies are ripe for adopting in a very systematic way project management methodologies. Now there's many ways of doing project management, but what I think is really important to understand is that something as big as delivering election is not actually a project. It is what's called a portfolio of interlinked projects. Think about that and then think about how every project needs budget.