The Pankian Metaphor 3140

so that goes back to the comment in comptroller general talk regarding projection, instrumentation, metrics, audit, validation, etc regarding spending programs ... including accurately accounting for whether the money is actually being spent on what it is supposed to be spent on. it involves fundamental accountability.

it is somewhat like capacity planning ... w-o fundamental instrumentation and measurement regarding what currently goes on, it may be impossible to understand what might happen if anything changes (aka if you don't understand what it is currently happening, it is probably not possible to understand what might happen if things change).

somewhat the discussion regarding improvements to road use metrics and accounting deals with making information even more accurate. just because there may be major flaws in other parts of the infrastructure (and possibly only in specific jurisdictions) doesn't mean that these specific issues shouldn't be addressed at all.

reference to the comptroller general's talk

past posts referring to the comptroller general's talk

my own counter argument to the accountability paradigm, I used at a financial sector conference in europe last fall. many of the European executives were complaining that sarbanes-oxley was causing them significantly increased costs (and pain).

my observation was that particular accountability paradigm is basically looking for inconsistencies in a firm's records. however, given the prevalent use of IT technology for maintaining corporate records ... a reasonably intelligent fraudulent endevor should be able to make sure that the corporate IT technology generates absolutely consistent corporate records. Increasing the amount of auditing isn't likely to effective in such a situation.

It is somewhat like the buttumptions related to the benefits of multi-factor authentication; the buttumption is that much of the benefits comes because the different factors should have different threats and vulnerabilities. This buttumption is negated if all the authentication factors being used have common threat or vulnerability.

In the case of audits and accountability, there is some buttumption that records from different corporate sources may show up inconsistencies when fraud is involved. That buttumption is negated if corporate IT technology can be used to maintain and generate all corporate records and therefor guarantee consistency. Somewhat built into that audit and accountability paradigm is the buttumption about records from different sources (and looking for inconsistencies).

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