Hello from the Peak District
I hope you remain safe and well as your country finds its way out of their lockdown arrangements.
My big news this month is that the online public financial management course I have been creating with my friends at ABMC International is now published. It is available at a special introductory price until 31 July 2020. Click here, or click the picture, to learn more, see the curriculum and to register for the course.
If you want to check out the course before buying you can get a free taster of a couple of its lessons from the same link.
What have I been doing since the last newsletter?
Much of my time in June and early July was spent recording and editing video lessons for the CPFMA course but I also did some writing for the ACCA. The two projects I contributed to have not yet been published so I can’t say more now. I’ll tweet and post about them when they are published.
Public financial management in the news
Public financial management remains in the news because of Covid-19 and governments’ responses to it. Here are some links to stories:
- In the context of COVID-19, is cash still king when trying to balance government accounting sheets?
- I’ve previously included some stories about modern monetary theory. Here’s a BBC video, explaining the “deficit myth” which helps explain how governments can spend as much as they need on their Covid-19 response.
I have also seen some non-Covid-19 stories, including this one about a study that suggests governments could collect more tax if they asked nicely. Well, it’s not really about asking nicely so much as making it clearer to people and businesses that paying taxes is a good, socially-responsible thing to do.
Here’s a link to a brand new TED talk about participatory budgeting by Shari Davis, the executive director of the Participatory Budget Partnership based in Brooklyn, NY.
This article looks at the experience of whistle-blowing policies in several African countries. It notes that the Nigerian policy of allowing the whistle-blower to receive a percentage of any corruption funds recovered by the government leads to more people being willing to give information about corruption.
Finally, here’s a story about how a public sector accountant in Sri Lanka took a stand to prevent publicly-owned products being sold too cheaply.
Keep in touch
You can keep in touch with me in many ways. First, of course, you can reply to this email. You can also follow me on Twitter, or connect with me on LinkedIn and FaceBook.
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