My meandering conversation with Professor “Marina” about the auditing framework.
I had lunch yesterday talking to Professor “Marina” who teaches accounting at PCC. We were at a cafe in Pasadena.
Decolonize Accounting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider buying my lunch like Marina did.
Marina: So, Arnie, I get that you are excited about these indigenous-led auditing frameworks and “intemerate accounting,” but I have a basic question. How can protocol, reciprocity, even something like the “valuation of bones,” ever be as reliable as standard Western accounting? I trust GAAP, IFRS, SEC filings (see annex). I do not see how protocol and trust networks can replace that.
Arnie: They do not replace it. They redefine what is material and who gets to verify it. Western accounting starts from the firm and the state. Intemerate accounting starts from the community and their traditional home. The question is not whether protocol or reciprocity substitutes for evidence. The question is what counts as evidence and who is allowed to produce and audit it.
Marina: But reliability depends on standardized rules, independent auditors, and transparency. Markets trust that. Communities are important, but that sounds subjective. How do you prevent capture or favoritism if the auditors are “from the community”?
Arnie: Start with the structure. An intemerate audit has several layers.
There are community-defined protocols. These are the rules that say who speaks for land, water, graves, fishing grounds, and so on. They already exist as customary authority.
There are also ecological and social baselines. These are measured conditions: fish counts, soil health, water quality, food security, displacement risks, and cultural sites.
Then of course, we have the intemerate auditor trained in ecological resilience. This person learns statistics, accounting, and local protocol. Their job is to document those baselines and track changes.
Also, there are external peer reviews by other indigenous or community-based auditors, or local governments, science communities, international organizations… people who are not from that village or that project. We’re dealing with comparative data, and if local data sovereignty can really be a thing, we would need someone who can verify data while prioritizing community consent.
Arnie: You get reliability because no single actor controls the data. Local knowledge sets the categories. Technical training standardizes the methods. Peer auditors check the work.
Marina: You are describing a profession, almost like a CPA, but for ecology and culture. What makes that different from an ESG consultant?
Arnie: In intemerate accounting, the community owns the raw data. Auditors and intermediaries only get “licensed” access. That reverses the usual ESG arrangement where consultants extract data for investors. ESG is designed to protect investor portfolios. Intemerate accounting is designed to protect community resilience and ecological restoration. Investors can still participate, but they have to adjust to community-defined baselines, not the other way around.
Marina: Let me push back. I am all for indigenous rights. But when you talk about “bones” and “ancestral remains” as variables in an audit, I worry you are drifting into something really abstract. How do you “value bones” in a way that a bank, a pension fund, or even a development bank can understand?
Arnie: Start by defining what the “valuation of bones” actually means. It is never the act of pricing a skull or attaching a market figure to ancestral remains. It is the recognition that burial grounds, genealogical obligations, and ancestral sites are sacrosanct. They sit outside the field of commodification. Treating bones as something to be measured in money requires erasing a people’s history. That is the premise that underlies genocide.
Arnie: Let’s look at Tuvalu, where Australia is essentially pushing for a citizenship-for-territory swap. You couldn’t pay me enough to work on a project like that. Trading your bones for citizenship is really like a history of warfare, where the victor desecrates ancestral bones. Submergence does not dissolve the connection. The relationship to land, spirit, and lineage persists even when terrestrial life becomes difficult. Communities adapt; they create the technological capacity to make settlement functional, unless, of course, they just want to leave, but that’s different from relinquishing one’s ancestral claim.
Also, that continuity is a measure of resilience. It carries more value than any external valuation of land could provide. It is not a financial metric. It is a measure of identity, obligation, and endurance that no external accounting framework can replace.
Marina: So you are reframing “bones” as a structured constraint and a permanent liability, not as some mystical add-on. Fine. But then we still have the question of transparency. Western accounting standards are open. Anyone can read IFRS rules. I do not see that with your accounting matrix. How do I trust that these indigenous audits are not just a cover for local graft?
Arnie: Western rules are open on paper, but you know very well that a lot of the real decisions happen in private back rooms, tax rulings, and side letters. Transparency is not just about publishing standards. It is about who can see the data and contest it.
In an intemerate framework, transparency works in two directions.
Horizontally, inside the community, people see how baselines and scores are produced, and of course, they can challenge them.
Vertically, any external funder would get a standardized summary: resilience scores, risk flags, protocol obligations, data provenance, whatever the needs are.
Arnie: The audits show which indicators are community-verified, which are satellite-verified, which are third-party lab results, and where there is disagreement. That is often more honest than a single “impact score” in a glossy ESG report.
Marina: You know my concern. BRICS and BRI- these multi-lateral arrangements look like geopolitical tools. They talk about “win-win” and “South-South cooperation,” but the deals are negotiated behind closed doors. Debt terms can be harsh. Why would I trust an “indigenous audit” that is plugged into that ecosystem?
Arnie: You should not trust it blindly. The point is that an intemerate audit gives communities leverage in any ecosystem, whether it is BRICS, BRI, or OECD finance— it’s just that I don’t believe any country within the OECD system would engage in a system that ultimately doesn’t benefit them or allow them to set the rules of the system. We’ve already seen what the World Bank is trying to do with FPIC. How do you standardize any Indigenous Peoples’ process for Free, Prior, and Informed consent? Multilateralism within the regional context provides far more flexibility, and in my opinion, can move very quickly. Look at COP, the big countries will drag their feet until climate is past the tipping point, then they will act when they hold all the cards. I’m sorry, I don’t want to live in that world. There have to be other options… remember, another world is possible, and an alternative accounting matrix is probably the most straightforward way to get there.
Arnie: If a bank wants to fund a port or a road, the intemerate audit says:
Here is the current social and ecological baseline.
Here are the community’s non-negotiable constraints.
Here are the obligations and revenue flows needed to improve resilience rather than degrade it.
Here are the conditions under which we will share our data or revoke consent.
Arnie: That makes the deal legible and contestable. If the bank ignores the audit and the project goes bad, there is a clear record that the community flagged the risks. It becomes evidence for renegotiation.
Marina: But does any bank actually care? I work around institutional investors. They like clean numbers: internal rate of return, net present value. They would put ESG on top if they have to, and that is probably less the case now under Trump. But they do not rewire their models around local cosmologies.
Arnie and Marina: Trump… lol…omg…Epstein…(expletives and such)…
Arnie: At the end of the day, the international accounting framework has to change, so why not start from an equation that cannot be dominated by Western accounting practices? Accounting is the fundamental that locks in conditions of colonialism, and to decolonize accounting, in my opinion, that’s the most important act.
Arnie: The intemerate auditor is the person who can translate between these worlds. They can sit with a village council and talk about bones, rivers, and genealogies. They can also sit with a credit committee and show how those same elements map to risk or long-term resilience indicators.
Marina: Explain the career path to me. Say I am a student. I study “ecological resilience auditing” under your framework. What do I actually do for work? Who pays me?
Arnie: Start at the community level. A village, a municipality, or a network of tribes commissions a resilience baseline. That includes vulnerability profiles, ecological status, and cultural sites. The intemerate auditor participates in that work. Maybe advises… but the valuation comes from the community, and the role of the auditor might be to recommend or help adjust those values, but I don’t know, maybe think of the auditor as an informed translator.
Then you have intermediary businesses. These are community-controlled entities that package projects: mangrove restoration, regenerative agriculture, small-scale energy, local health or education services. They need credible audits to access climate finance, development funds, or cooperative banks.
On the other side, you have funders. They need a pipeline of projects that are both ecologically sound and socially legitimate. They pay for audits and ongoing monitoring because that lowers their risk. Over time, auditors can work for community cooperatives, public agencies, or independent firms that specialize in intemerate verification.
Marina: So this is a whole ecosystem. Community protocols at the base. Intemerate auditors in the middle. Intermediary businesses and funds on the finance side. How does trust actually travel through that system?
Arnie: Maybe, I’m not sure. I’m not prepared to answer that question. I think a lot of options probably exist, but what you ask is going to evolve over time. I mean, to some degree, it probably already exists in a thousand different historical contexts, and if I were to name them or identify them, I would be overstepping boundaries. I mean, I have a general idea of how trust networks could evolve, but I think as soon as you define it, someone is going to develop a cryptocurrency, and it’s just going to look like shit.
Arnie: The fundamentals, however, are probably co-designed standards. Communities, auditors, and funders agree on a core set of indicators and methods, while leaving room for local variation. Each audit generates time-series data. Over five, ten, or twenty years— or even in months, you can see which communities and which auditors consistently meet or exceed resilience targets. That creates reputational capital.
And then there is network verification. Auditors and communities review each other’s work. If a project in one region claims implausible gains, others can call it out based on their own experience with similar ecosystems. And that’s not to say that there are no statistical outliers, and if there are, then we shouldn’t ignore them and adjust them to the center, but we should celebrate them and acknowledge them.
Arnie: The point is that trust is not abstract. It is documented in repeated, verifiable interactions.
Marina: Where does multipolarity fit in that picture for you? From my side, I see a lot of risk. Weak governance in recipient countries, big Chinese state-owned enterprises, debt distress, and lack of transparency. I do not want to swap Western hegemony for Chinese hegemony.
Arnie: I do not want any hegemony. The point of multipolarity for me is not to replace one center with another. It is to expand the negotiating power of communities and regions.
BRICS and BRI are important because they open additional channels of credit, trade, and infrastructure investment. Otherwise, they would have to rely on the IMF, World Bank, and G7 terms. But that only helps if communities have their own accounting and auditing tools. Otherwise, they remain as colonial subjects, stuck in the accounting valuation of deals made in Washington or Brussels.
Arnie: Intemerate accounting is one way to anchor those flows in local sovereignty. Whatever the flag on the money, the audit says: here are the conditions under which we will cooperate, and here is the evidence if you violate them.
Arnie: Ten years ago, I helped to organize the Moana Nui conference, After the second conference in Berkeley, combining the various themes of trade, militarization, resources, indigeneity, and globalization, my friend Ali’itasi and I met up in one of the hotel rooms and mapped out what we call the RRMA: the Regional Regulatory Monitoring Authority, and we submitted that to the Pacific Island Forum and that is what led me to participate in the World Band Fragility Forum on SDG 16— and that was a huge eye opener. I went to the statistical meetings and it was so obvious that these were back-door capitalization systems— but anyway, I was lucky that I got to do that.
Marina: You are asking me to shift my baseline. I usually start from the idea that Western accounting is neutral and everything else is political. You are saying Western accounting is also political, and indigenous auditing makes that visible.
Arnie: Exactly. Western accounting is very good at tracking cash, liabilities, and shareholder value. It is very bad at tracking ecological depletion, unpaid care, dispossession, or spiritual harm. That is not a bug. It reflects the priorities of the economies that designed it.
Indigenous-led auditing does not claim to be neutral. It says openly that the purpose is to sustain the community, the land, and future generations. Then it applies rigorous methods to that purpose: clear protocols, measurable baselines, peer review, and data governance.
Marina: I still worry that once you plug this into big geopolitics, it gets co-opted. A bank might badge a project as “indigenous-audited” while still pushing through highways, mines, and ports that serve its strategic interests.
Arnie: Co-optation is always a risk. The safeguard is where the data sits and who can withhold it. If the community controls the underlying data and the right to say yes or no, the intemerate audit cannot be faked without breaking protocol.
It is not perfect. Neither is GAAP or IFRS. The difference is that here the primary reference point is the community’s continuity rather than the investor’s quarterly earnings.
Marina: If a young person asked you whether to study for a CPA or become an intemerate ecological resilience auditor, what would you say?
Arnie: I would say there is room for both, and the world will need the connection between them. If you become a CPA, of course, you will make an immediate income. But if you learn how ecological and social risk actually work on the ground, if you become an intemerate auditor, you would end up learning how to sit on the mat, which I think is much more valuable than sitting at the table. For one thing, you have to earn trust.
Communities will need people who can quantify resilience in a way that respects protocol and reciprocity. Investors and public agencies will need people who can translate that into contracts, covenants, and long-term obligations.
Marina: I still have reservations about BRICS and especially about China. I am not ready to trust BRI just because there is an “indigenous audit” attached to it. But I can see that what you are describing is not just mystical talk. It is a serious proposal for how to structure evidence and trust.
Arnie: Don’t dismiss it. Recognize it as a different starting point for what counts as value and who gets to define risk.
Marina: Fair. Next time you run a training or have a draft of these standards, I would like to see them. I am curious.
ANNEX
GAAP, IFRS, and SEC auditing form the core architecture of Western accounting because they support large capital markets, not because they offer a neutral or comprehensive view of value. GAAP and IFRS standardize how firms recognize revenue, assets, liabilities, and risk so investors can compare companies across jurisdictions, while SEC auditing enforces these disclosures through legal authority. Their reach comes from the scale of US and European financial systems, which makes their methods global defaults. They excel at tracking cash flows, ownership, and measurable financial risk, but they do not account for ecological depletion, cultural obligations, or intergenerational continuity unless those issues threaten profitability. Their authority is institutional and market-driven, rather than an indication that they capture the full range of what societies consider valuable.
https://onibaba.substack.com/p/ecological-intemerate-auditing