Folly of the DaySolicitor Loses His Client's Case, Is Asked by the Regulator How He Knows the Man, and Volunteers That They Are Going Into Business Together Making Desserts
The incompetence was survivable; solicitors lose cases, and tribunals have a long-established tolerance for the merely useless. What finished him was the instinct that arrives the moment a professional is asked a direct question by someone entitled to the answer — the conviction that a true fact, carefully selected, is a shield rather than a trap. He did not lie about the desserts. The desserts were real. He simply believed that a regulator presented with a pudding business would stop wondering about a payroll, and that he could edit the record of his own life in real time and be believed, because he was the sort of man whose word had always been taken. Every profession is a promise that its members will not do exactly this. He paid £28,000 to learn that the promise was load-bearing.
Source: Legal Futures
The WireHaulage Boss Who Was Also the Transport Manager and Also the Driver Spent Two Years Driving on a Former Employee's Tachograph Card
There is a particular species of small-business arrogance in which a man appoints himself to every post in the organisation and then discovers that the compliance officer he must answer to is also himself, and can be got round. He was the driver breaking the rules, the manager charged with catching him, and the director responsible for both — a closed loop of self-supervision that felt, from inside, exactly like being trusted.
Source: GOV.UK / Office of the Traffic Commissioner
The WireCouncil Paid £600,000 a Year to Send Fifteen Children to a School Ofsted Had Rated Inadequate
Forty thousand pounds per child, per year, to an institution the state's own inspectors had already condemned in writing — which is not a failure of information but a failure of nerve, the commonest kind in public administration. Somebody read the report. The report changed nothing, because changing something would have required a person to sign his name to a decision, and the invoice required no signature at all.
Source: LancsLive
The WireThe Man Who Prosecuted the World Was Dismissed by a Vote of Eighty-Two Countries
The office exists on a single premise: that no position is high enough to place its holder beyond an accounting. Eighty-two states have now demonstrated that the premise applies inwards as well as outwards, which is the only way it was ever going to be believed. Institutions do not earn moral authority by asserting it; they earn it on the days they are obliged to use it on themselves.
Source: UN News
The WireNew Director Sacked the Secretary Because He Did Not Care for Her, Dressed It Up as Redundancy, and Cost the Company €367,000
The dislike was free; it was the paperwork that cost €367,000. A man arriving in a new office with the power to remove people he finds irritating will almost always mistake that power for a licence, and will construct, in perfect confidence, a commercial rationale that a tribunal can dismantle in an afternoon. He wanted her gone and he wanted to be thought reasonable. The second wish is what was expensive.
Source: NL Times
The WireConsultant Solicitor Took £7,000 of Client Money Into His Own Account and Told the Courts and the Crown Prosecution Service a Different Story
Client account rules are not subtle, and they are not a matter on which reasonable practitioners differ; they are the one thing every solicitor is taught before he is taught anything else. Which is precisely why the man who breaks them is never confused — he is confident, and his confidence rests on the belief that the rule was written for the sort of person who would be caught.
Source: Law Society Gazette
Black-Robed EgomaniaJudge Stopped Twice in Two Days Over an Expired Boat Sticker Explained That He Was a Judge and Therefore Too Busy to Register His Boat
Consider the arithmetic he performed on the water. Registering a boat takes twenty minutes; explaining to two uniformed officers that one is a judge takes four seconds and, in his estimation, achieves the same result. That is not a man cutting a corner in a moment of weakness — it is a man who has arrived, over years on a bench, at a settled theory of his own exemption, and who was willing to test it twice in forty-eight hours because the first test had gone so well. The office is meant to make its holder more careful about small laws, not less. He has now been given ninety days in which to be as busy as he says he is.
Source: Colorado Politics / Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline
LazyTownDrivers Pulled Their Cards Out of the Machine Rather Than Be Recorded Working Too Long, and Halved the Company's Fleet
The card goes in the slot. That is the entire labour being avoided here — a gesture roughly equivalent to putting a coin in a parking meter, refused 28 times across two thousand miles, on the theory that a machine which records nothing has seen nothing. Half a fleet was traded for the trouble of a thumb.
Source: GOV.UK / Office of the Traffic Commissioner