A Pavitt Public Finance series
Rules, Unfiltered.
Getting the accounting right, proving the spend followed the rules, and the people who do the work.
A working set of essays and short posts on the unglamorous parts of public-sector compliance and accounting. The lead column, The Compliance Check, lands weekly; IPSAS, Unfiltered continues inside it as a column. Published on Substack, cross-posted to LinkedIn, archived here so the patterns stay findable.
Filed entries
Recent posts from the field.
A working pattern of what's been showing up across implementations. Each entry links to the post on Substack.
- RU-0132026.09
The auditors were trained last.
An audit office is often examining a government's first accrual statements while it is still learning how, and the report is read as though that were not so. The cause is structural: the transition is a finance ministry programme, with that ministry's budget line and steering committee, and the audit office is a separate institution nobody sits at the centre of. Where it stalls is the budget, because audit training is not a line in the programme. The first opinion after a transition measures two things at once, whether the accounts were ready and whether the people examining them were.
audit · accrual · capacityRead on Substack → - RU-0122026.09
What the whole of government actually owes.
The consolidated statement is the last one prepared and the first one read, because it answers what the state has and what it owes. Adding the entities up is the easy part; the subtractions are where it becomes difficult, since a transaction between two entities was recorded twice, by different people, in different months and sometimes at different amounts. The first attempt is less an accounting exercise than a discovery exercise: undisclosed SOE guarantees, unpaid power bills nobody was tracking. Start with the list of entities and a written reason for each being in or out, then publish it.
consolidation · controlled entitiesRead on Substack → - RU-0112026.09
Who writes the management response.
Every audit report contains two documents, and the one people work on for the next year is the second. The management response is printed alongside the findings, so an oversight committee, a donor or a new minister reads the finding and the answer together. Answer each finding with a step, a date and a named post and the report reads as a second-year work programme; answer "noted" and it reads as a filing exercise. Disagreeing is allowed, provided the refutation is disciplined. Who writes it is decided months before the report arrives, by whether anyone asked.
audit report · accrualRead on Substack → - RU-0102026.09
The first opinion is going to be qualified.
The first audit opinion after an accrual transition is almost always qualified, for reasons that were visible three years earlier. The opening balance has never been audited by anybody, because until that year it did not exist in that form, fixed assets are short and the employee benefit liability has never been valued. Saying so at the start of the transition costs nothing and turns the audit report from a blow into a document everyone expected, and a qualified opinion is a working list of specific matters, which is a different thing from a disclaimer.
accrual · audit opinionRead on Substack → - RU-0092026.08
What the register says is there.
An asset register is wrong in both directions at once: things on the list that left the building years ago, and things in the building that were never written down. Purchases reach the list on their own, because buying creates paperwork somebody is required to file. Disposals need a committee, an inspection and a signature, and transfers need nothing at all. Nobody is measured on whether the register is right, which is survivable until accrual turns it into one of the largest lines on the statement of financial position.
fixed assets · accrualRead on Substack → - RU-0082026.08
What the government thinks it has.
A treasury can pay every bill on time and still hold only an estimate of what it has in the bank. The ledger balance and the bank's differ for reasons that are dull individually and compound with age, and the only process that settles them runs monthly at best, from the most junior desk in the office. Falling years behind makes no noise at all, and cash rationing means the estimate is what this week's payment decisions actually run on.
cash · reconciliationRead on Substack → - RU-0072026.08
Three lists, one payday.
The largest recurring expenditure in the budget reaches the ledger as the least informative entry of the month: gross, deductions, net. Everything that made those totals happened in offices that never post a journal, the establishment register, the appointment letter, the acting allowance nobody stopped. An appointment is a commitment that runs for years and clears no commitment control.
payroll · commitmentRead on Substack → - RU-0062026.08
The contract the ledger never saw.
A contract signed on a Wednesday: three years, four milestones, five per cent retention, a performance security lodged before any work starts. The finance system hears none of it until the first invoice lands eleven weeks later, one number. The largest obligations are the ones the ledger learns about last.
procurement · commitmentRead on Substack → - RU-0052026.07
The check in the wrong place.
The purchase order clears, because there is money left in the vote. Eight weeks later the invoice arrives and the contract was signed by someone who did not hold the authority to sign it. Budget availability is the part of control a system can always answer. The procedure is the part it usually cannot.
commitment · procedureRead on Substack → - RU-0042026.07
One chart, three readers.
One invoice for a generator, read by three people who never meet: the budget office reading control, the accountant reading IPSAS, the statistician reading GFS. Three true descriptions of one machine, which only become a contradiction when the chart forces them through a single field.
IPSAS · GFS · budgetRead on Substack → - RU-0032026.07
Where your law and the standard disagree, the law wins.
The standard says capitalise the truck. The financial instructions, written twenty years before anyone had heard of accrual, say it is expenditure of the vote. Both sentences are on the same desk. What the officer who signs can actually defend, and what has to be written down on the day.
IPSAS · statuteRead on Substack → - RU-0022026.07
The paragraph that doesn't exist.
Ask a general-purpose AI tool a public-sector accounting question and it will often cite a standard and paragraph that do not exist. Why, in this work, the citation is the part the auditor checks, and the discipline of re-reading every reference against its source before it is shown.
IPSAS · citationsRead on Substack → - RU-0012026.07
Every rule that binds it.
One ordinary payment answers to three rulebooks at once: the accounting standard, your own law, and the donor's manual. The first post sets out what Rules, Unfiltered is for, and the checking discipline behind every finding.
IPSAS · statute · donorRead on Substack →
Posts are published on Substack so practitioners can subscribe and read them in their own feed. This page archives the index so the patterns stay findable.
About the series
Patterns, not opinions.
Rules, Unfiltered is for practitioners watching public-sector compliance and accounting from inside and outside the daily detail: compliance officers, deputy accountants-general, audit firm partners, donor-side PFM advisers, finance ministry economists. The pieces are pattern-level — what's recurring across implementations — not project-specific.
Cross-published on LinkedIn for the feed and the comments. Archived here so the patterns stay findable when somebody is looking for a precedent rather than scrolling.
Published in English first, with batch translations to Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic on a rolling basis. Translations are vetted, not machine-pushed.
Subscribe.
Substack primary, also on LinkedInSubscribe and each new essay lands in your inbox: one a week, in plain language, on getting the accounting right, proving it complies with your own rules, and the people who do the work. The archive stays here; the writing comes to you.
Goes together
Drills + Desk + Series.
The series covers patterns at the system level. Drills builds daily reflexes on the failure modes those patterns expose. Desk handles the hard cases when they show up on your books. Each works alone; together they cover the field.