Brian LaMacchia

IACR 2025 Election: Long Statement for Treasurer

Dear fellow members of the IACR,

I have served as the IACR’s Treasurer since January 2017, and I seek your vote to continue in this role for another three-year term.

The IACR has grown significantly as an organization over the past nine years, and the scope of services handled by the IACR’s Treasury department has grown over that time as well. Treasury provides direct support for “IACR Corporate” functions (e.g., running the IACR as an organization) as well as partnering with each IACR event’s General Chair to run their event.

Here is a quick overview of some of the services IACR Treasury provides to IACR Corporate and to each of IACR’s conferences:

For IACR Corporate:

• Banking, accounting and bookkeeping services
• Cash management
• Investments management per the IACR’s Investment Policy
• Works with the IACR’s tax preparer to draft & file our US tax return (IRS Form 990)
• Sponsor Accounts Payable (A/P) systems management
  • Including handling IACR accounts on all sponsor-specific A/P systems
• Bill payment for IACR Corporate expenses
• Purchase and annual review of IACR Insurance policies
• Handle JoC & CiC expenses
• Manage recurring expenses that charge to the IACR’s credit card (e.g., cloud services, Crossref membership for DOIs, IACR domain registrations, etc.)

For each IACR event:

• Foreign exchange/currency movement
• Seed fund transfers (for events with local bank accounts)
• Payment of all event-related expenses (for events without local bank accounts)
• Sponsor payment processing & tracking
• Contract reviews (e.g. hotels, conference centers, event spaces)
• Student travel stipend processing
• Invited speaker reimbursement processing
• General Chair reimbursements for local expenses
• Final financial report reconciliation and audits

During the past three years, IACR Treasury has implemented two significant improvements/changes to IACR procedures:

1. Centralization of student travel stipend processing & payments
2. Direct payment of local expenses for many IACR events (depending on location)

Beginning with TCC 2023, IACR Treasury began centrally processing student travel stipend grants (awards) for all IACR events. Previously, General Chairs were responsible for selecting award recipients, deciding how much each student should receive, and reimbursing students for their claimed expenses. The process of reimbursing students varied by host institution, was often cumbersome on the student, and in some cases required students to submit personal information (e.g. tax ID numbers) beyond what was strictly necessary to process the reimbursement. Under the new system, GCs provide lists of students receiving awards and the amount of those awards to IACR Treasury and students email copies of their receipts to stipends@iacr.org after they attend their event. Treasury then reviews the receipts and issues reimbursements to the students, and our reimbursements are almost always issued in the student’s choice of local currency. Our goal is to issue student reimbursements within 30 days of submission of receipts, and we are generally much faster than that.

The second significant change that’s happened over the past three years has been IACR Treasury taking on the role of “local banker” for an increasing number of IACR events. That is, whereas in the past every IACR event had to have a local bank account and General Chairs paid their bills out of that account after being advanced “seed funds” from the IACR, it is now possible for IACR Treasury to handle bill payments directly for an increasing number of IACR events. The move to centralized handling of event banking has been driven by two factors. First, in many countries it is getting increasingly difficult to open a local bank account for a transient event, especially when that event is organized by a “foreign” entity. Second, recent improvements in online foreign exchange services have made it much easier, quicker, and cheaper for IACR Treasury to directly pay non-US vendors in their local currency. (This is true for most of the commonly used currencies in which we transact, including EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, CHF, NOK, and SEK.)

For the next three-year team, the two projects I have planned for IACR Treasury are (1) to enable the IACR to charge some conference registration fees in non-USD currencies (in particular, EUR), and (2) to enable the IACR to receive SEPA payments for EUR-denominated charges. These two projects are related and will require work from both IACR Treasury and Membership (the Membership Secretary owns the registration platform that we use for our events). Today, all IACR events are ultimately budgeted in USD and registration fees are set in USD, no matter what the local currency is for the event. Budgeting and charging in USD for non-USD events introduces some foreign exchange (currency fluctuation) risk. For eurozone events in particular, if we had the ability to budget and charge in EUR, we could avoid extraneous currency conversions (especially for attendees from euro-using countries). Further, if we can enable SEPA payments for our EUR invoices, we would be able to accept direct bank transfers from EUR-denominated accounts to the IACR’s EUR account without going through a traditional credit card (and paying the associated 3-4% credit card processing fee).

We have greatly improved the efficiency of the IACR’s financial systems over the past nine years, but there is more modernization work to do. I am running for another term as Treasurer to continue improving our financial infrastructure and administering the IACR’s assets in a fiscally sound and prudent manner.

As always, if you have any questions about IACR Treasury, you can email me at “treasurer at iacr dot org.”