10 CAPTURE. COSTTREE 2016 Q2 ISSUE
LOGISTICS
The generally accepted accounting principle for representing the true cost of services is a cost allocation plan. This document allocates the administrative costs of an agency to show a fully loaded cost of all the direct services provided. Instead of seeing huge administrative expenditures, the citizen would see a true cost for the Sheriff, Parks, Health and Human Services, and Public Works departments after the administrative costs were attributed appropriately.
Now our citizen knows how much the services really cost, but when considering his votes, he realizes he still doesn’t have the whole picture. How much should a county be spending to keep an officer on the street or to maintain their roads? After the county does the work to prepare a true cost picture of its services and the citizens take the time to find, read, and understand the data, all this information still may not mean much. The final piece of this puzzle is to provide context through comparison.
Ideally, the county would participate with other counties on a multilateral platform to compare their data and benchmark their services. By seeing how the costs and service levels of other counties compare, our voter is able to form an educated opinion on the efficiency of his county and how he should direct his elected government to act.
Had the county provided a true cost of services with comparative context, instead of just departmental costs, the citizen could have seen that the costs for the IT department and the Finance department were really spent in service of the Sheriff, Parks, Health and Human Services, and Public Works department’s efforts to protect, beautify,
IMPORTANCE OF TRANSPARENCY