Make Auditors' Reports Available to Membership

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Full text of the email I sent to each board member on 7/14/2026

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[Director]

I appreciate the FY2027 board’s early efforts to address some of the concerns expressed by membership. Board Chair Mann’s first messages conveyed the board’s commitment to better communicate with members as we all work together to get our organization back on track.

 

Members are looking for evidence that the board intends to match its commitment to improved communication with equally meaningful actions. One action that could be taken immediately at your July meeting would be to authorize publication of the last five years of certified auditors' reports. 

 

In my view, this action would be easy to accomplish, cost little to nothing, and carry no risk of confidentiality. Please consider these points:

 

Current available financial information is insufficient to tell the story the board needs to tell: Unlike the summarized financial information contained in CSI's annual reports, an auditor's report provides independent assurance regarding the financial statements, explains the scope of the audit, identifies significant matters where appropriate, and expresses the auditor's professional opinion concerning the fairness of the organization's financial presentation.

 

Auditors’ reports are readily available to the board: Each of the annual reports that I was able access on the website contained this line at the top of the financial summary, “From the CSI independent audit, period ending June 30, 202_” but none of the annual reports contained a copy of the actual auditor’s report. Although William Sundquist on the CSI Community Forum [Posted 05-21-2026 05:00 PM] referred to “…publicly available materials” including “…the last five annual reports [and] the independent audits,” a search of the website returned 16 hits, but none of them were for auditor’s reports.

 

Allowing members to review the auditors’ reports is consistent with your governance policy: As the governing body accountable to CSI's members, the board has both an opportunity and a responsibility to provide information sufficient for members to understand the organization's financial stewardship. Your own Policy Governing Manual reinforces this concept and gives you a duty to make this information available upon reasonable request.

 

Auditors’ reports do not fall under the veil of confidentiality: Unlike personnel matters, privileged legal advice, or sensitive negotiations, an independent auditor's report is ordinarily intended to communicate financial information rather than confidential deliberations.

 

Auditors’ reports provide independent verification: Because the auditor is independent of management, the auditor's report carries credibility that internally prepared summaries cannot. Making those reports available would allow members to evaluate the organization's financial stewardship using information that has been independently examined.

 

Positive and decisive action by our board is needed now: Whether intended or not, the absence of this information has contributed to speculation, rumor, and declining confidence among many members. Publishing these reports would demonstrate that the board intends to address concerns through transparency rather than assurances alone.

 

It is for these reasons that I, as a member of CSI and one of the owners whom the board serves, respectfully request the board to make auditors’ reports for last five years available to membership.

 

To be clear, I do not I presume financial misconduct has occurred but rather take the default position that the organization's financial position has been responsibly managed.  Publication of the auditor's reports provides the board with a perfect opportunity to demonstrate that fact through independent professional verification rather than reassurance alone.

 

Respectfully submitted,

/s/

CSI Governance and Loss of Membership Trust

 

[NOTE: I sent this letter Monday, June 22, 2026, to each of the CSI Board Members prior to the start of the 2027 Fiscal Year. It's the synthesis of four months of online discussions, conversations, and correspondences with CSI members, sponsors, and customers. If you've found your way here, you are probably aware of what's going on at the Construction Specifications Institute in the first half of 2026.]

Censorship

In March of 2018, a comment I made during a discussion on the CSI Community forum was removed by administrators. It was an innocuous post amid a lengthy discussion on the difficulty members were having finding things on the relatively new website. I don’t recall what the specific comment was, but CSI’s removing it led to a lengthy discussion with Cam Featherstonhaugh, who was at that time moving his way up towards chairmanship. He ultimately agreed to reinstate my post in the discussion then moved the entire chain from the main Community forum over to a new area called Suggestion Box.

This led to a whole other discussion over why Cam thought it made sense to move a valuable discussion for encouraging member engagement from the forum with over 8,000 members to an area had less than 80 members. I told Cam that “moving a discussion to Suggestion Box serves to censor discussion rather than solve issues.” Sound familiar?

I had completely forgotten about the incident – after all it was eight years ago – until today. I have no ill-will against Cam and as a default believe that any person who volunteers for CSI has CSI’s best interests at heart. Occasionally in groups like ours, we have different opinion on what is best. Now fast forward to today…

Elias Saltz had posted a single word comment: “Crickets?” 

Thanks to Brian Payne for the capture of my response:

Before long, my post was gone and this text from Cam appeared:

"Passive agressive [sic] comments are not helpful. They harm the organization and they harm people. Actual human beings for whom this is their livelihood, who deserve dignity, even if you think they made a bad decision.

I flagged a recent comment here as inappropriate. I will continue to flag these kinds of comments. Enough is enough.

This space is for advancing the knowledge of practice, not attacking the leadership of our organization. Go on Facebook if you have to complain publicly."

Although Cam’s post is redolent with defensiveness, I’m not implying that today’s censorship results from an 8-year-old grudge. I’ve reached out to Cam to talk it over with him and fully expect that he will call me or email me back. I’m basing this expectation on my recollection that he was respectful and cordial when we talked back in 2018. I’m willing to apologize for hurting his feelings, if that is what is going on here. It’s never good to use your words to harm others, and that certainly was not my intent here.

This is all poignantly sad. Perhaps the board sees the new MasterFormat licensing as the viable course to save our association. But the ultimate underlying problem is not the new gadget that is still in the box waiting to be unwrapped on March 31. The problem is that membership’s legitimate concerns and questions are treated dismissively. The sad part is that if CEO Mark Dorsey and his board had been honest, communicative, and transparent in their actions, they might have been able to get everything they wanted without alienating a large chunk of their membership.

The 1st Amendment prohibits Congress, among other things, from abridging freedom of speech. Later Supreme Court decisions determined the guarantee applies only to government actions, not to those of private enterprises. I freely acknowledge that CSI, as a private entity, has the right to censor speech on their community forum.

 

In fact, one could make the argument that their management should actively moderate and suppress speech they determine is inappropriate for their discussion areas. Such suppression is not necessarily malicious and could be justified to:  

 

•           Preserve CSI’s public image

•           Limit misinformation

•           Maintain order

•           Avoid conflict

•           Protect feelings

 

It is clearly within management’s purview to set policy for how their website is controlled, and that includes censoring speech they consider to be detrimental to the ends they are trying to achieve. The ironic thing about choosing to suppress speech is that the more dissent is suppressed the more it spreads.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (look him up, kids, he’s a fascinating character in our history) famously gave us this advice in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927): “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”