I'm not going to disagree with any of that, but I'm going to go back to a couple of comments I made earlier, because I think the context has to be understood.
I firmly believe, and I think it is well and generally accepted, that the accrual basis of accounting for historical cost statements is the best way we can tell the story of what transactions and events happened with a particular organization--be it a company, a not-for-profit organization, a hospital, a church, or a government.
The accrual basis for accounting is the best way we can tell the story of what happened. The cash basis has been totally rejected as a basis to be able to do that. It cannot do that. It's incapable of doing that.
Once you've made that decision, and you've accepted that--and those are the only standards we have--then the second piece, to get transparency and accountability from a governance point of view, is you need to compare what actually happened versus what somebody said a year ago they wanted to happen. The only way you can get true comparability is if those two bases of measurement are the same. If they're not the same, then you can't get that measurement.
The cash basis of preparing your budgets opens up possibilities for manipulation that are very simple. You just forget that you've got a drawerful of invoices and you don't pay them. Then that's it, you've made your budget.
Are there complexities with accrual-based budgeting? Of course, there are. Are there possibilities that people can play games? Sure there are. Are they different? Sure they are. Are they more complex? It's difficult to be able to say whether they're really more complex. If the transaction or the event they're supposed to capture is complex, then I defy anybody to tell me how you can have a simple way to capture an event or a transaction that is really complex by a simple method. So, yes, sometimes the events and the transactions are complex and you have to be able to get a mechanism, a measure, a rule--because that's what it is, we're measuring things--that will cope with that complexity.
The way I come at it is to say that if you want transparency and accountability, you have to be able to compare like with like. Preparing budgets on an accrual basis is a little better than doing it on a cash basis and doing the reconciliation back to accrual.
That's the way I would answer that question.