Bristol City Council’s quarterly internal audit report into its financial management is out and the news, as usual, is uniformly bad. The council’s own assessment of its management of our money remains ‘of concern’ – as it has been for over two years now. Will it ever end?
Highlights in this dismal report in to serial organisational incompetence include:
“Non-compliance with Procurement Regulations is wide spread”
In other words contacts are dished out to friends, family, acquaintances, former employees, people from the golf club etc.
“Poor contracts monitoring has been identified as the cause of large overspends”
Once they’ve awarded contracts to their mates nobody bothers to enforce the terms of the contracts. Any old crap’s good enough for Bristolians
“Failure to monitor adherence to contracts [means] poor value for money”
Not bothering to enforce the terms of these contracts is costing us all dear except the lucky recipients of these unmonitored anything-goes contract arrangements.
“Inadequate strategic overview of engagement and use of consultants”
Highly paid consultants are employed at the drop of a hat to do the work that the highly paid managers aren’t capable of doing.
“Internal Audit recommendations are not actioned within a reasonable time frame”
When dodgy financial arrangements and deals are uncovered fuck all is done about it.
Bank Reconciliation and Cheque Control – OF CONCERN
The amount of cash and money that should be coming in to the council is not cross checked with the amount of cash and money that is coming in to the council. A free-for-all for embezzlers!
“Markets Operation – OF CONCERN”
Almost one year after £165k ‘disappeared’ without trace from the Markets Service and, still, nobody knows what’s going on with our money in that department; nobody’s doing anything about it and nobody’s responsible.
“Material income misappropriation”
Or theft as it’s generally known. This is thought to be a separate issue to the missing £165k in Markets. More news on this as we get it …
And the response to this theft of our money?
“Action plan under development”
Because that’s what you do when you realise a load of money’s been nicked isn’t it? Obviously you don’t report it to the police and try and catch the culprits …
“Payroll – OF CONCERN”
Yep. You read that correctly. Even the payroll’s fucked.
“Direct Payments – OF CONCERN”
The system of handing money over to health and social care clients to buy their own services is, predictably, in chaos
“Administration of Imprest [ie. cash] Account – Identified areas of noncompliance”
More bent managers running dodgy financial systems open to embezzlement. Now why would they do that?
Significant number of fraud referrals during first quarter is concerning
Yes, it’s actually getting worse folks … Full report here (pdf).
Well its good to hear that Bristol City Council has reacted to this report by blocking the Bristolian. Managers should now be able now to carry on as normal and ignore any reference to this report or the underlying problems it uncovers.
That’s because in this the town the problem people are the ones exposing wrongdoing not the wrongdoers who are constantly protected.
It’s also a bit of an eye opener to read the minutes of the Audit Committee meeting where this report was presented:
https://www.bristol.gov.uk/committee/2013/sc/sc015/0924_mins.pdf
It seems when the item came up the councillors and members of the committeee who bothered to turn up – unlike the Indyredpants candidate Brenda McLeannan, a supposedly ‘politically independent’ member of the committee – just sat there mute and listened to a monologue from their incompetent and way-out-of her-depth Chief Internal Auditor.
The substance of the monologue being that things might improve when they’ve tested the new finance software that’s cost us £40m from our new private partners Agilysis and when their Internal Auditors all get back off sick leave.
It seems a little extraordinary to spend £40m on finance software that may not work doesn’t it? And let’s face it, if your organisation’s finance management is so degraded you cannot even be arsed to reconcile your cash in the bank, no software will sort that out. It’s a management culture problem. Not a technical problem.
But incredibly, from our councillors, no outrage, no bollockings, no arses put on the line, no final chances for useless staff and certainly no apologies to the public for the shambles they’re overseeing. Just silence …
What’s the point of them?
The Bristol blogger still around eh, writing self-important drivel? Bit harder since they banned you from the Internet for writing poisonous lies eh? You sad little coward.
“Banned from the Internet”? Is that even a thing?
Bizarre accusations from someone with a reputation for trolling under a variety of names in a variety of places!
Would it not be better to restrict your frothy-mouthed comment rampages to your LBC manor? Our richly-oxygenated Bristol air probably isn’t good for your constitution.
Is this the “banned” Bristol blogger site ? – http://thebristolblogger.com/
Seems pretty unbanned to me
One example of waste/payments to their chums – Old people in care usually have have direct debits from their bank accounts to the council -it’s reduced according to their means to pay, but these payments tend to carry on when the elderly person inevitably has stays in hospital or moves into a home. When the council are challenged about this they make excuses like ”its backdated” or ”you have to pay for the full month if the elderly person receives care for a couple of days.”.
This means the ”private care organisations” continue to be paid on average £700-£1000 per week from Council Tax payers money which they are not entitled to.
Thanks – that’s very interesting, Black Beard. We shall look into that…
I can relate to all of this. I’m from Wirral, where abuse is out in the open, unchecked and spiralling down into gangsterism and inevitable police involvement.
It just may take a while longer as there’s an “inner ring” of high level crooks, still calling the shots and protecting each other.
The involvement of an LGA “improvement” board may have set us back years.
It’s the chutzpah of some of those involved which stands out – a failure to properly account for lots and lots of (relatively) small amounts of our money, which add up to rather large sums
And instead of action, blanket denials, stony silence or else the smearing of whistleblowers…
From small acorns… grow mighty oaks.
….here, officers plundered £700,000 + from the bank accounts of learning disabled people, bullied the whistleblower out of his job, and were never called to account, then paid off in a figure which has now surpassed £1 million. The two main culprits, Mike Fowler and Maura Noone, rode out a sham investigation, evaded elected member scrutiny, then shared a cool £220,000 between them.
the whole of bcc are busy loading their purses at the expence f the electorate, no wonder they are scared to fight george fergusons parking tax schenme, he knows where the skeletons are buried
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