Subject: [fwd] Yungui's reply to SVC (II)

From: dong (D.C.)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 94 04:01:50 CST

>From [email-masked]  Tue Jan 18 12:26:53 1994
Subject: My reply to SVC (II): some notes on the record of the whole process
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
        [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
        [email-masked]

My reply to SVC (II): Some notes on the record

Yungui Ding

1. The whole process: A simple thing is not simple

Should it have been a simple thing from the very beginning? Yes, it should.

The Council's Finance Committee (FC) proposed a bill to the Council to conduct
an inspection of the HQ's financial record and property list in order to
asses the current situation of IFCSS' management and to submit to the Council
any recommendations to professionalize IFCSS's accounting practice.

It is a normal internal auditing procedure, it is a normal business, and it
is a normal operation. Normally, the bill is passed or rejected. If the bill
is passed, the FC would be authorized to conduct the inspection. If some 
FC members are too busy to go, others could help. If the FC considers 
necessary to have someone in the team having experience/expertise in accounting
it would be fine to call for and invite some more volunteers. It would not
be hard for the HQ to cooperte: just open the accounting books to the
Council' tema for inspection. Nobody would expect it to be perfect considering
that most workers of IFCSS are on volunterr or partial-volunteer basis. 
The FC then would give its report to the Council after the inspection process
is finished and probably some recommendations on how to improve the current
system and practice. Then the Council may consider the results and the 
suggestions, and may further pass some bill on financial regulations.

It could be so normal, and it could be so simple.

It was actually so normal a business that in the first session of the
Council's first Tele-Conference that most of the Council members did not
even pay much attention to the bill, which was initiated by Council FC
Chair Shen Tong and sponsored by the FC, although there was a
good debate on it. The bill was NOT passed due to too many absteins, with
very few strong yeah's or nay's.

The bill was reconsidered one week later (8/21/93) in the second session of
the Conference, and it was easily passed this time. Of course the more time
for the Council members to digest the bill and the whole situation helped
the re-consideration and the passing of the bill, but some political
manuvour that was intended to block the bill's reconsideration might have
contributed more to the situation.

Things seemed to become not that simple.

The bill was not passed without expense. The FC Chair, the initiator and
advocator of the bill, Council member Shen Tong had to ask to resign from
both the FC and the Council. She only agreed to stay in the positions upon
the request of many Council colleagues. 

Even so, things could still have been as simple as the business is.

Unfortuantely, what has come out is not what we could have imagined. 
The date of the on-site inspection had to be postponed again and again
due to the difficulty the FC had encountered to get needed materials
from the HQ. 

The inspection team (IT) finally got to the HQ offics on 11/6 to conduct
the on-site inspection. It could not start the work at the beginning due to
the questioning and blocking of an invited volunterr Bai Yan by President
Lin Changsheng and SVC Coordinator Mr. Luo Li-Shi. The disagreement was 
resolved on site after the communications among the Council Chair, IFCSS
President, IFCSS SVC Coordinator and members of the IT.

However, this issue somehow came up alive again and again later in the
process, being used as an excuse to block any further progress of the 
inspection, and finally making things into an extreme case.

Why and how did such a normal operation become so complicated?

2. Who is doing the work, who is making trouble

Thess questions are for the SVC and the CSS community to answer.
Take a look of the whole procedure, and note the key difficult 
points along the way. I believe you will find the answer.

>From the side of the Council's work, I just notice this:

   Shen Tong, initiator of the bill,
              was somehow forced to withdraw from the front line;

   Zhou Hongguang, 
              FC/IT member, coordinator of IT,
              was charged of "dishonesty" among other allegations;

   Ding Yungui
              was appealed against because of making a progressive 
              update of FC' work on behalf of Zhou Hongguang.
              
I would believe these were coincidences. However, it it unfortunate that
these "coincidences" could only be very effective to stop or slow down the
inspection process, which by no means will help IFCSS to anywhere.

Yungui Ding
IFCSS Council member
from Mid-West region