Interested to read this week of the sending down of a civil servant who stole a little over £1m from his department a little under ten years ago. The theft having taken a little while to come to light, and only then by the thief being shopped by his nearest & dearest.
It seems that the deed was done by the time honoured mechanism of setting up shell companies with plausible sounding names and then making payments to them for fictitious services. While my limited understanding of such matters is that one of the basic objectives of accounting procedures & processes is to stop exactly this kind of thing. So, for example, you have to get a company put onto a list of approved suppliers before you can make a payment. You can only make a payment against a duly authorised purchase order. All kinds of stuff.
No doubt somebody has been tasked with writing a report on how such a thing could come to pass in the Department of Education.
No doubt also part of the answer will be that if you cut back hard on headquarters staff, the kind of processes that were in place to stop just this sort of thing are apt to be skipped or scamped.
Don't think one can put it down to the strain of taking on the duties of the more or less abolished Local Education Authorities - people you might think would have been better placed to make payments to do with swimming - as it all happened before that got properly underway.
PS: presumably the Department has been able to get its money back as it had been invested in a flat in Wandsworth. A flat which may well have doubled in value over the years in question. Were they able to take the whole flat back? Or were they reduced to charging interest - that is to say more or less nothing - for the period in question?
No comments:
Post a Comment