I did say that the Parliamentary Fees Office was going to be very vulnerable as a result of all of these leaks, although not in the way I had predicted.
First, Andrew Walker, the head of the Office, has been condemned for not having an accountancy qualification. The merit of that argument has been shot down by my old colleague Sara Bedford, so I won't add anything to her comments, except to note that there are very few HMRC officials with an accountancy qualification, and we seem to administer the tax system pretty well in spite of that.
However, what I did discover is that the leak may very well not have come from there. In fact, the expenses information collation had been contracted out to a private company, so the leak might just as easily have come via that route.
Today, though, I want to address the proposal that an independent group be set up to audit MP expenses. It's a rubbish idea and is designed to protect MP's, not to set proper limits on their expenditure. In short, it's not the audit that is the problem, it's the rules themselves. The Parliamentary Fees Office is perfectly capable of carrying out a proper audit if given the opportunity and resources to do so. If the rules are lax, the audit has no effect.
If I was a Liberal Democrat MP, I'd be voting this 'reform' down. If it achieves anything, it will be to draw a veil over the issue that Freedom of Information campaigners worked so hard to bring into the open. Clearly, there are those who have learned nothing in spite of the events of the past week...
You don't need to be an accountant to vet expenses claims. What's needed is some untrusting person with a nasty mind and and a dour manner linked to an understanding of every word of the expenses rules and an ability to count. He or she would need to have seen pretty well every fiddle in the system, a memory like an elephant and to have the authority to tell the twisting bastards to foxtrot oscar off in a pleasant and non confrontational manner. He or she must also be backed to the full by the management. So with the straightforward honesty of Mr Speaker behind them.......... er perhaps not.
ReplyDeleteRichard,
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely right. I think that this is a job for a faceless bureaucrat. It also sounds very much like the job I do now. I wonder how much they're offering...
Who vets the Peers - see the News of the World?
ReplyDeleteMark, not 10% commission I hope.
ReplyDeleteNo need for commission, the fact that a service to the public was being provided would suffice. The old-fashioned public sector ethos would demand nothing less. And I'm very old-fashioned in that sense...
ReplyDelete