Barbara Mittleman asks:
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Does ICANN have a policy for the constituent groups which covers, e.g., ICANN Board of Director's responsibilities for financial oversight and auditing as relates to the subgroups; conflicts of interest, finances and fund raising; autonomy of the SGs with respect to finances; how the groups' finances and fund-raising fit with the not-for-profit status under US/CA law (governing law for ICANN)? 

Response:

Barbara, having only been Treasurer for less than a week, and with no prior NCSG Treasurer to call on and no prior documents from the office, I can only give a tentative answer to your question, and the short answer is "NO!". ICANN's multistakeholder process is not only unique in terms of policy making on a global scale, its structures are unique as well. There is a potentially deep well of consulting income here for lawyers :-\  to get a longer answer to your question but, from what I can gather, constituency groups and support groups, while chartered from within the ICANN process, are not subject to the oversight and auditing one would expect for -as you put it- "subgroups" within an organization. In some ways the organizational link between NCSG, IPC, GAC, etc. is more like the one where independent groups are accredited to participate in the meetings of various UN and multilateral agencies, except that within ICANN they also constitute the core of the policy making process.  SGs and CGs are not administrative subgroups within ICANN as I understand it.

This may well be as it has to be, with accountability resting within the subgroups. I cannot imagine ICANN having oversight over how Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC), GAC, or other groups within ICANN raise, administer and use funds within their respective work. Since many of those groups also engage in lobbying in various national settings, the one set of  U.S. laws that would likely apply would be those requiring ICANN to register as a lobbyist for foreign powers, including some with which the U.S. may not have friendly relations. I don't think anybody wants to go in that direction. There may be a small piece of "lawyer work" for ICANN to clarify that CG's and SG's operate financially completely independent of ICANN, just to clear the situation there. The various Executive Committees may want to address that question.

I am proceeding as NCSG Treasurer on the assumption that each of NCSG, NCUC and NPOC  is internally accountable to itself, and recommending an annual report as simply a best practice for accountability to our members and sources of funding.

Sam Lanfranco, Treasurer, NCSG