Go back

PTI Board – Approved Resolutions from 29 March 2021 Special Meeting

Appointment of Independent Audit Firm for FY21

ARTICLE 9 Section 9.1 of the PTI Bylaws (https://pti.icann.org/bylaws#article9) requires that after the end of the fiscal year, the books of PTI must be audited by certified public accountants, which shall be appointed by the Board.

Whereas, the Board Audit Committee has discussed the engagement of the independent auditor for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2021 and has recommended that the Board authorize the President, or his designee(s), to take all steps necessary to engage BDO USA, LLP.

Resolved (PTI.2021.03.29.01), the Board authorizes the President, or his designee(s), to take all steps necessary to engage BDO USA, LLP as the audit firm for the financial statements for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2021.

Rationale for Resolution PTI.2021.03.29.01

The audit firm BDO USA, LLP was engaged for the ICANN annual independent audits for the fiscal years ending 30 June 2014 through 30 June 2020 and BDO USA, LLP was also engaged for PTI's independent audits for the fiscal years ending 30 June 2017 through 30 June 2020. Based on the report from staff and the Audit Committee's evaluation of the rationale, the committee has unanimously recommended that the Board authorize the President, or his designee(s), to take all steps necessary to engage BDO USA, LLP as PTI's annual independent audit firm for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2021 for any annual independent audit requirements in any jurisdiction.

The engagement of an independent audit firm is in fulfilment of PTI's obligations to undertake an audit of PTI's financial statements.  This furthers PTI's accountability to its Bylaws and processes, and the results of the independent auditor's work will be publicly available.  There is a fiscal impact to the engagement that has already been accounted for in the budget.  There is no impact on the security or the stability of the DNS as a result of this appointment.

This is an Organizational Administrative Function not requiring public comment.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."