Where does the money come from? [President's Message]

The first thing to understand about the IEEE Industry Applications Society's (IAS's) finances is that the Society does not have any money. IAS has no bank account and no checkbook. IEEE has the money. With the exception of conferences, the IEEE receives and spends all the money that we show as the Society's income and expenses. The IEEE has set up an accounting system that credits IAS accounts with certain categories of income and debits IAS accounts for certain categories of expenses. On those occasions when the IEEE says that our share of an expense is a certain amount, the IEEE simply removes that amount from one of the IAS accounts. We can argue, but the money disappears anyway.