Too late to stop us now, says PAC in States review

Saturday 9th January 2010, 2:29PM GMT.

Leon Gallienne THE Public Accounts Committee is pressing ahead with plans to improve the States, despite being asked to delay.

It will hold a public meeting on Thursday as part of work to overcome severe deficiencies identified by the Wales Audit Office investigation into good governance.

The Policy Council had requested it delay any consultation until a requete by Deputy Matt Fallaize had been debated at the end of February.

That motion would restrict any report to staying within the current consensus model.

PAC chairman Leon Gallienne (pictured) said it had been given the go ahead by the Policy Council on 21 October to take the review forward.

‘Since then my staff and the board and others have made a considerable amount of progress. There’s been a lot of work done. We’ve spoken to many people. We just feel at this time that it’s too late in the day to stop this,’ said Deputy Gallienne.

He said the work the committee was carrying out was well within its remit.

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1
Darren

January 9, 2010 at 10:08 pm

As stated in other posts.

The States had competent internal audit, governance and risk functions between 2001 and 2006 when they employed a qualified audit manager and had a team of 7.

The audit manager had their licence extended for 2.5 years however that was all and was forced to leave the island; since then the States let the audit and risk team dwindle to ZERO people (of course they would often sub-contract work out occassionally at market rates and extra expense!).

How can States expect to have effective and efficient governance systems and processes in place when they do not invest in the right places; why on earth you need the cost and time of the WAO to tell you this, and then take another 6 months to start doing anything is beyond me. I expect the recommendations which will take another 6 months to get rolling will be something like:

1 – a new audit manager
2 – enterprise risk management function
3 – portfolio management
4 – Job descriptions with Governance, risk and audit responsiblity included for managers et al

You had a perfectly agreeable system in place; it only needed Dave Clark to extend the licence of the audit manager and Guernsey would have had effective Governance ad infinitum. Short term gain for long term pain.

Who takes responsibility for the current position out of interest? Isn’t that what PAC are about – identifying and holding people to account?

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