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As one important element of transparency and accountability, ICANN strives to publish meaningful, accessible financial and operational information. Through its history, ICANN has consistently increased its financial reporting. Within the last 24 months, for example, ICANN developed monthly dashboard reporting on financial data. Earlier this year, the dashboard started to provide financial information by primary functions. See http://forms.icann.org/idashboard/public/.

In response to community requests to view ICANN’s expenses in reports more aligned with stakeholder interest areas, ICANN has developed a new financial report: Expense Area Group (EAG) reporting. The categories depicted in this view of ICANN’s budget are based on ICANN’s organizational structure. http://www.icann.org/en/structure/

The attached paper [PDF, 272K] describes the Expense Area Group reporting, the analysis and methodology used to create these reports, and more information on cost accounting at ICANN.

This new EAG reporting is simply one more view of ICANN’s finances, equal in importance with a functional representation, or a representation by ICANN’s accounting codes. In fact, no single representation captures the fundamentally interconnected nature of ICANN’s work and mission. ICANN is responsible for coordinating the Internet’s unique identifiers at a global level, which is only possible when all of ICANN’s organizational structures are working with each other, and on a global basis. Still, this EAG analysis should provide another useful way to understand the totality of ICANN’s financial operation.

The community is encouraged to provide feedback on this new financial report, to help ensure that this type of reporting is responsive to the needs of the community. A comment period has been opened for feedback on the Expense Area Group reporting at this online forum and will remain open until after the Sydney meeting.

Related links:

Expense Analysis (pdf):
http://www.icann.org/en/financials/eag-analysis-29may09-en.pdf

Public comment forum for analysis paper:
http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/public-comment-200906.html#eag-feedback