ERP Modernisation in Local Government: Why Projects Slip
The failure pattern is consistent across entities of very different sizes, and it is established during procurement rather than during implementation.
Digital Transformation
Research & Insights
Twenty-five publications on financial oversight in the public sector — method, practice and the places where both go wrong. Open to everyone, without registration, permanently.
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Showing all 25 publications
AI in Government Finance
Where AI Actually Helps in a Municipal Finance Office
Most of the value from machine learning in local government finance is not in prediction. It is in triage — deciding which of ten thousand transactions a human should look at first.
Municipal Budgeting
Structural Balance: Reading a Budget Beyond the Bottom Line
A balanced budget and a structurally balanced budget are different claims. Telling them apart takes about twenty minutes and four adjustments.
Fraud Prevention & Detection
Anomaly Detection in Purchase Card Programmes
Purchase cards concentrate a disproportionate share of detected public-sector fraud in a small share of spending. The controls that work are unglamorous.
Public-Private Partnerships
Value for Money Analysis in Public-Private Partnerships
The comparison is only as good as the risk quantification, and the risk quantification is where the analysis is most often engineered toward a conclusion.
AI in Government Finance
Building an AI Governance Policy for a Public Finance Department
A workable policy fits on six pages and answers five questions. Anything longer tends to describe aspirations rather than constraints.
Municipal Budgeting
Multi-Year Financial Forecasting for Small and Mid-Sized Governments
A five-year forecast that nobody believes is worse than no forecast. The credibility problem is usually structural, not statistical.
GASB & GAAP Compliance
GASB 87 Leases: Implementation Lessons Worth Carrying Forward
The standard is settled. The operational problem it exposed — that nobody owned a complete contract inventory — mostly is not.
ESG & Sustainable Finance
Green Bonds in the Municipal Market: Disclosure and Use of Proceeds
The label is voluntary, the pricing benefit is modest and contested, and the reporting obligation is real. Issuers should be clear about which of the three they are buying.
AI in Government Finance
Model Risk Management for Public Finance Analytics
Banking supervisors have spent fifteen years formalising model risk management. Most of it transfers to public finance at a fraction of the cost, if you drop the parts built for capital adequacy.
Public-Private Partnerships
Risk Allocation Frameworks in Availability-Payment P3s
Allocate each risk to the party that can best control it, price it, or absorb it — and accept that some risks satisfy none of those tests.
Fraud Prevention & Detection
Segregation of Duties in Small Finance Departments
In a department of three, ideal segregation is arithmetically impossible. Compensating controls are not a lesser substitute — but they only work if they are specified precisely.
GASB & GAAP Compliance
GASB 96 SBITAs: Identifying and Measuring Subscription IT Arrangements
The accounting is a close cousin of GASB 87. The hard part is deciding which of four hundred software contracts is actually in scope.
Municipal Budgeting
Priority-Based Budgeting: What It Takes to Make It Stick
Programme inventories are the easy part. The reason most implementations fade after two cycles is that nothing was allowed to end.
Digital Transformation
Data Quality as Infrastructure for Financial Oversight
Analytics projects in public finance fail on data quality far more often than on methodology. The remedies are boring, cheap, and rarely funded.
Fraud Prevention & Detection
Vendor Master File Hygiene: The Quiet Fraud Control
Most disbursement fraud starts with a record, not a payment. The vendor master file is where the control is cheapest and least often applied.
AI in Government Finance
Explainability Requirements for Automated Public Spending Decisions
The standard for a public entity is not that the model is interpretable. It is that the decision is defensible to the person it affected.
ESG & Sustainable Finance
Climate Risk Disclosure for Local Government Issuers
Investors and rating agencies are asking. The difficulty is that the honest answer for most issuers is a range, and disclosure practice is built for point estimates.
GASB & GAAP Compliance
GASB 34 and the Government-Wide Statements: A Refresher for Non-Accountants
Two sets of statements measuring two different things is the design, not a redundancy. Reading them as alternatives is how officials reach wrong conclusions confidently.
Municipal Budgeting
Fund Balance Policy Design: How Much Reserve Is Enough
Two months of expenditure is the most-cited target and one of the least-justified. The right level depends on four measurable properties of the entity.
Fraud Prevention & Detection
Benford's Law in Public Sector Audit: Uses and Limits
It is a screening tool for selecting samples, not evidence of anything. Treating a conformity test as a finding is the most common misuse.
Public-Private Partnerships
Monitoring P3 Contracts After Financial Close
The transaction team disperses, the contract runs for thirty years, and institutional memory has a half-life of about four.
GASB & GAAP Compliance
Closing the Books Faster Without Losing Control
Most of the delay in a public sector close is waiting, not working. The fix is scheduling, not effort.
ESG & Sustainable Finance
Measuring Social Outcomes in Public Investment
Outputs are cheap to count and easy to defend. Outcomes require attribution, and attribution is where most public measurement quietly gives up.
Digital Transformation
Open Financial Data Portals: Design Choices That Matter
Publishing everything produces a portal nobody uses. Four design decisions determine whether a transparency site informs anyone.
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