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-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.