External audit for 2018 financial statements

[Martin Michlmayr]

SPI has decided to get an external, independent audit done for the
2018 financial statements.  In addition to getting a third party to
perform checks on the accuracy of the financial statements, SPI
expects to receive feedback on its internal controls, processes and
policies and to identify areas for improvement.

SPI has engaged Gary Eisenkraft (CPA) to conduct this audit.  Gary
also does the audit for Software Freedom Conservancy and SPI decided
it makes sense to use the same firm since they are a) familiar with
NYS regulations and, more importantly, b) familiar with the use of
ledger-cli as the bookkeeping system. (An open source bookkeeping
system raises some questions since you may have tempered with the
software in order to manipulate your financial statements.)

I've been engaged to prepare SPI's book for the audit.

As part of this work, I have identified a number of mistakes in the
published 2018 reports; I found some minor suboptimal classifications
of expenses, some wrong classification of expenses, and more
seriously, a small number of cases where expenses were allocated to
the wrong project.  Since I'll make some other changes, I won't point
out each individual change in the 2018 reports now.  Instead, I'll try
to post some kind of changelog after the external audit is performed
and we have audited financial statements for 2018.

SPI is taking steps to improve its processes and procedures to reduce
future mistakes.

In the June 2019 report, some of the opening balances for projects
will have changed because of the changes above.  I've emailed each
affected project about this already.

-- 
Martin Michlmayr
https://www.cyrius.com/