I would like to share this beautiful sentence I found in the Annual Report of the Department of Education (year ended 31 March 2023, Page 54) Here it is:
“The overall negative RAME balances (income) reported above are driven by student loan unwinding of the discount applied which is significantly larger than the Group’s levy-funded bodies (CITB and ECITB) which report their activities as AME.”
Now I guess accountants that work in the Department of Education or Treasury would find this simple and comprehensible. I, as an ordinary accountant, qualify it as gibberish, twaddle and unnecessarily complex.
Some might say, I have taken it out of context and thrown it into this article, so I am being unreasonable. But I will argue if you don’t know what RAME or AME is nobody would ever understand it.
RAME, for the ignorant like me, is a ‘Resource AME budget’. AME for the ignorant like me is ‘Annually Managed Expenditure’, so logically RAME means a ‘Resource Annually Managed Expenditure budget’. That makes it very clear does it not?
But this is not simply a RAME but ‘negative RAME’, and not even that but a ‘negative RAME balance’ which is signalled (in the brackets) as income. This I suppose is logical: negative expenditure must be income.
Here is another one from page 21, simpler in nature but gibberish again.
“In addition to the expenditure described above, the Group also incurs outlay away from SoCNE that generates budget outturn.”
I should explain that the SoCNE means a ‘Statement of Comprehensive Net Expenditure’, and as usual this doesn’t help very much.
But what I wanted to comment on was ‘outlay’ and ‘outturn’. I must admit I have never used these two words in any comments on my budget. They must be ‘Treasury Speak’ and I will try to explain to myself what the DoE is trying to tell me.
If someone ‘incurs outlay away from’ something, I guess this must be extra expenses incurred outside the SoCNE. And then this extra expense must generate a budget overrun or to use Treasury Speak’ a budget outturn.
Expert accountants who qualified with the CIPFA will surely find these two sentences, not gibberish, but clear, precise and informative.
