Standing up for common sense in New Barnet
Thursday, 18 November 2010
Enormous Financial Errors
Barnet Council very kindly put up on their website a list of supplier payments over £500. Mr Reasonable spent a great deal of time going through those figures and some appeared very strange indeed. I posted some of my analysis following my one to one with Cllr Thomas and had a reply back from one of those suppliers Calco Services who stated that no they had not received £1.3 million they had only received £54k. Concerned that there may be a fraud being attempted Mr Reasonable contacted Barnet Council. This afternoon I have received a note saying the figures were wrong and they have now published a new supplier list. Going thorough the top 104 invoices by value (all £100,000 or more) I find that 32 payment details have been changed. These amount to £11.1million of changes. Frankly I have no confidence in the figures and I defy anyone to make a sound contribution on where budget cut should fall if we are not clear what is being spent. The odd error maybe but so many and of such scale and they would have gone completely unnoticed except for Mr Reasonable's intervention. What a shocker!
You are a terrier! Congratulations on exposing more wrongdoing.
ReplyDeleteTop blogging. Keep up the good work
ReplyDeleteWell done - the start of a "Suppliergate" scandal, I imagine.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work.
Mr Reasonable, thank goodness for armchair auditors like you. I hope that the Labour group will do something about all this: it should not be up to residents to trawl throught the accounts checking up, but thank goodness you have.
ReplyDeletePS Have just noticed an announcement on the council's Facebook page that it has missed 37% of its own mid year performance targets: see -
ReplyDeletehttp://www.barnet.gov.uk/cp-annual-perfo
That is very odd - most performance targets are set, such they they will be met!
ReplyDeleteI do hope you have highlighted this to Department of Communities and Local Government.
ReplyDelete