mr anderson
Banned
Posts: 59
Joined: May 2011
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Jail for Ofcom employee who stole £520,000
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08-06-2011 20:47 |
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mr anonymous
Senior Poster
Posts: 108
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RE: Jail for Ofcom employee who stole £520,000
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08-06-2011 21:11 |
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SOCATOA
"mini see through thong"
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RE: Jail for Ofcom employee who stole £520,000
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10-06-2011 01:12 |
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eccles
custodes qui custodiet
Posts: 3,032
Joined: May 2010
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RE: Jail for Ofcom employee who stole £520,000
Defence barrister, Avtar Bhatoa, said ... 'It seems that things were not well at home, things were not well at work, and there was an eight month period when he lost his sense of judgement.'
That explains it then.
It has been standard practice for years following Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley* that purchase and payment have to be authorised by at least 2 different people. Its also long standing Civil Service procedure that any spend has to pass though multiple pairs of hands. It should not have been possible to purchase equipment without a business case approved by someone higher up. At some stage someone should have been saying OK, this equipment you said you needed, where is it? Also in many public sector organisations you simply cannot specify who you want to buy from for commodity items like computers. One way or another large orders go to public tender. If you say it is specialist equipment with only one supplier the purchase request gets examind by a lot more people and in more depth. The rules are there to stop exactly this kind of thing.
This suggests that Ofcom has weaker financial controls that its sponsoring government department and controls that are below generally financial accepted standards.
Its good that it was spotted by the IT department, but it should never have happened. Someone has some serious explaining to do.
At times Ofcom seems to operate like a cosy club occupied by like minded people who simply do not comprehend that anyone could disagree with them. They think they are decent reasonable people, ergo anyone who disagrees is either not decent or not reasonable, and can be ignored. Thir corporate governance is a laugh, to a large extent they govern themselves and see nothing wrong with that, and now it turns out that that the necessary checks and balances on financial processes were not in place either. Perhaps someone thought they were not necesary. I feel a letter to the MP requesting a Parliamentary Inquiry coming on.
* Yes, I know Sarbanes-Oxley is American but the principles have been globally adopted, partly because Accountancy and Auditing standards are pretty much global, and because dual-approval is good practice.
Gone fishing
(This post was last modified: 10-06-2011 23:18 by eccles.)
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10-06-2011 23:16 |
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