About My Assignment to Haiti


Daniella will be working for three months in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as part of the MCC team, helping office staff improve accounting procedures to deal with the generous monetary response to the earthquake disaster in January 2010.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) is a worldwide ministry of Anabaptist churches, responding to basic human needs and working for peace and justice. To find out more about MCC, visit their website at http://mcc.org/.
While wanting to share my experience in Haiti with family and friends, I've also chosen to extend the invitation to my professional network, particularly those engaged in the field of accounting. I've been thinking a lot about Accountability lately. I'd like to invite you to join me, as I explore what accountability means to us as accountants, both within the global economy and the global community. I will attempt to explore this larger issues while describing a very specific case of how not for profits attempt to be accountable to donors for disaster relief funding in a very unique context.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

An Accurate Account

I had a little heart to heart recently with a fellow professional in the accountability business. The media team was here from headquarters to photograph the work MCC is doing and report back to donors. Yes, sadly, the power of a simple picture and narrative is so much more tangible to donors than financial statements. But financial statements provide the verifiable data for what may only be a fleeting image in the right lighting, right?

The photographer and I were discussing the ability of photographers (or accountants) who are employees of an organization to really tell the story like it is. Donors only want to hear the good news, don't they?

It reminds me of conversations I've had with those who claim that shareholders don't want to know the bad news. Aren't smooth earnings better than rocky earnings that may hurt shareholder value or require extra work to analyze? Provided only good news, how do shareholders, like the anecdotal frogs, know at what point the tepid water has turned to boiling? Are your financial statements a fleeting image in the right lighting?
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