If you’re having an annual review and agreeing your objectives with any half-decent manager, you will know what SMART stands for – Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Timebound. Instead of having some nebulous objective which you don’t understand and which can’t be objectively measured, you agree meaningful objectives and at the end of the year, you and your manager or staff can agree if objectives have been met. It’s standard stuff.
But NAMA HQ is a SMART-free zone, and today the Agency has published its objectives for 2013 and lo and behold, there’s not a specific target or measurable objective for the 12 months of 2013 at all. It’s a good job that the senior folks at NAMA waive their bonuses because otherwise there could be a real bunfight over whether or not objectives had been met.
In fairness, there is one metric in the objectives – NAMA does estimate its operating costs in 2013 will be €140m, down from what NAMA says was €167m in 2012. In fact, NAMA’s budget for 2012 was €194m, but it seems that NAMA is conveniently ignoring receivership costs and is deducting these from proceeds of sales at companies to which receivers have been appointed.
NAMA is continuing to recruit and now employs 206 staff directly from the NTMA who are involved in the disciplines shown below (in brackets) plus 550 staff who manage smaller loans at AIB, Bank of Ireland and IBRC plus an army of service providers.
As for the objectives, they can be summarised as “NAMA will do its best”
NAMA Wine Lake 
maybe the stakeholders who are non state (not taxpayer funded whatever you want to call it…eh private investors I suppose)…maybe they can help us out by insisting upon some metrics by which a project or person can be shown to have failed.
If there is no such thing as “failure” what is NAMA then, a holiday camp?
“Creative accounting” or “window dressing”?
Creative accounting is the manipulation of financial numbers, usually within the letter of the law and accounting standards, but very much against their spirit and they are certainly not designed to provide the “true and fair” view of a company that accounts are supposed to.
A typical aim of creative accounting is to inflate profit figures. Assets and liabilities are manipulated to hide problems.
The term “window dressing” has similar meaning when applied to accounts, but it is a broader term that can be applied to other areas. In the US it is often used to describe the manipulation of investment performance. In the context of accounts, “window dressing” is more likely than “creative accounting” to imply illegal or fraudulent practices.
Changes in accounting standards open up new opportunities for creative accounting (the estimate of fair value or reduction of values over a particular period in the NAMA accounts is a good example of this).
Many (but not all) creative accounting techniques change the main numbers shown in the financial statements, but make themselves evident elsewhere, most often in the notes to the accounts. So watch out for the hidden bad news in the notes – an approach that can give the observer the edge.
Whether it is creative accounting or window dressing, one thing is for certain – It’s not the truth.
Standard stuff based on experience from other areas (agriculture and environment).’ Will try harder to do more, better, with less.’