Budget construction

A new team leader took over a month after the start of the emergency. He first had to find out why the actual expenditure was different from the budget. The budget was just a list of figures, one for each item of expenditure. He searched the files for the working papers and contacted his predecessor. She said that the workings were handwritten and in a drawer somewhere. He never found them. With only a single figure for each item and no explanation as to how it been constructed, it proved impossible to explain the overspendings and he was asked by the donor to redraft the budget from scratch.