Kalistan

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Chancellor announces audit of Imperial Finances Complete
"Books are generally Balanced," said Chancellor, noting areas for focus
Kaliburg, Grand Duchy of Ananto
May 18, 5658


The Empress and her Chancellor make public comment on annual Audit

Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Mary I Ananto and Chancellor of the Empire Lady Jennifer Alvarez-Miller sat down with The Republic to go over the annual audit of the Empire. "It takes a full year and a virtual army of CPAs and lawyers to go over receipts for the Empire," said the Lady Alvarez. "Several armies actually. They scrutinize each program the National Government funds, as well as our revenue system, our banking and finance system and each of the Nationalized Industries. Some ministries are easier to do than others, but some, like the National Service Program, take pretty much all year to complete. And there's no fast way to do it--even leveraging a lot of technology to reduce paper doesn't work, and creates a host of other issues. But after it all, the Audit demonstrates, without question that our Books are generally balanced, our receipts and invoices are in order, and public misappropriation is quite low, even by historic standards."

The Chancellor noted that the historic accounting firm of King, Bryan and Kohler, one of Kaliburg's biggest commercial accounting firms, has audited the National Government for more than 230 years. "Obviously the founders are not with the company any longer," said the Chancellor, "but their descendants have maintained a high level of attention to detail, and they charge what we consider a fair price for their services. Over time, auditing the National Government has become their primary function, though the remain a private, family owned firm."

The National Audit is not usually news, but recently Liberal deputies in the National Assembly have been insisting that there are irregularities in the National Audit where the Imperial Government has been siphoning money, making illegal payments to foreign actors and generally engaging in below the table financial transactions. "The Liberal Party has been insisting that there is a high degree of corruption in the operation and administration of the National Fund," said Chancellor Alvarez. "While Her Imperial Majesty knows this is not true and, having gone over budgets and ledgers of the Ministries Her Government oversees, I have no evidence that this is true either, this sort of charge, if not outright refuted tends to gain legs. Silence is the best fertilizer for base conspiracy theory. So this year, we decided to make a public matter of the National Audit, to show everyone in the Empire that Kalistan's government is well run and efficient, and is on both stable and ethical footing."

The Chancellor proceeded to provide The Republic with a copy of the Audit. "It's not a big secret," said Lady Alvarez. "The Government publishes the full text AND the executive summary online each year, and we invite people to check out that info for themselves. This year we scored a 94% passing on the audit, and while that number is significantly higher than organizations the size of our National Government, it does point to some areas where we will need some help. Most significantly, there are some notable irregularities in the National Health System, especially around payment for private sector services (things like over charges for some procedures and drug purchases from ODEN which are not well accounted for) and the KALMILINCO (the auditors noted a large amount of waste and in some cases, inaccurate or fraudulent misappropriation of Public funds by some private sector actors." The other main areas of discrepancies lied in administrative services, where the National Government contracted more of its functions to the private sector, who then used the contracts inappropriately. "There's also a bunch of little stuff in each ministry--theft of office supplies, people forgetting to clock out and then being paid for time they didn't work and that sort of stuff. Luckily it was relatively rare, but it all adds up," the Chancellor said.

"These are great challenges for our Government," said the Chancellor. "We have over half a million individuals working for the Public Sector in Kalistan. This doesn't include those in the National Service Program, our National Industries, or the Regular Military. The silver lining is that our Public Sector is generally honest, and are particularly assiduous in their local accounting best practices. At the end of the day, most of the leakage of the Public fund comes in the form of petty theft or time theft. Corruption is not much of a problem because we pay our public sector well, greatly reducing the allure of corruption. We benefit from the remnants of the old socialist system of the dual economy in this sense, which the Monarchs have largely left in place, while each Empress and Emperor have tweaked to provide more or less of a balance between public and private sectors. Additionally, we have benefitted from a very conservative fiscal attitude, holding interests rates to a small range around zero, and employing monetary policy aimed at promoting between =/- 1.5% growth annually, correcting for natural population growth. The ZPG Policies of the Government give this Empire a sound financial footing and make it easy for us to keep our financial house in order."

The audit showed an annual surplus in a similar historic range of more than ₭650 Million Imperial Ruble, which is returned annually to the General Fund, though is not permitted to be offset by tax breaks for any particular class. "Savings this year makes it easy to fund our programs next year," said the Chancellor. "We aren't just giving this money back to people after we've already collected, but we treat it as more or less a rainy day fund, incase we need to fund a dam or a Destroyer in a year that we don't usually build. What we don't use just rolls over and sits on the ledger as a rather sizeable budget surplus." The total roll over is more than ₭4.34 Trillion Imperial Rubles which the National Government treats as a slush fund for emergency projects and has been accumulating at the Imperial Bank for centuries.

The Chancellor noted that the new audit for the most recent year is already well under way already, and will be complete by May 1, 5659. "And Her Majesty's Government will publish that audit as well," said the Chancellor. "We have nothing to hide in how we do things, but hopefully this puts to rest the wild and baseless accusations of our Liberal Deputies that the National Government is rife with corruption, misappropriation, fraud, waste and abuse. I'll put Kalistan's audit up against ANY modern nation's audit. Most Corruption is confined to specifically private sector activities, The National Government maintains one of the most transparent General Funds of any organization within this country, and certainly does better on our audits than any nation one could point to."

The Chancellor met with The Republic's Miles Carruthers, and Her Imperial Majesty was present for the discussion to amplify any points the Chancellor may have missed, but instead permitted the Chancellor to speak for the Government so formal Protocol could be waived."

@TheRepublic