Folly of the DayThe Council Incorporated a Company It Was Not Permitted to Incorporate, Fed It $624,000 of Ratepayers' Money, Could Not Explain It to the Auditor, and Then Quietly Dissolved It.
The corporate form exists so that a body may do a thing at arm's length from itself; a council reaches for it not when the work is complex but when the accountability is inconvenient, and the tell is always the same — the entity is easy to create, expensive to feed, impossible to explain, and simplest of all to dissolve once someone asks.
Source: ABC News
The WireThe Tribunal That Hears Every GST Appeal in the Country Has 29 of Its 92 Posts Filled. The Court Was Told, by Way of Compliance, That Circulars Had Been Issued.
A circular is the purest artefact of official life: it records that something was thought about, costs nothing, changes nothing, and can be produced in court as evidence of diligence by the very department whose inactivity is the subject of the complaint.
Source: LiveLaw
The WireCounsel Did Not Appear Because He Had Just Lost the Bar Association Election. The Court Recorded That He Was in Shock and Adjourned the Case.
Every profession contains a small internal electorate whose approval its members prize far above the good opinion of the people they are actually paid to serve, and the reliable sign of it is that a defeat nobody outside the building has heard of can stop the building's work.
Source: LiveLaw
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Wairoa's Ratepayers Are Billed $12,923 a Household for Consultants and Contractors — Two-Thirds More Than the Next Worst Council in the Country.
The consultant is not bought to supply knowledge the council lacks but to supply a signature the council can point at afterwards, and the price of that signature rises in exact proportion to how little anyone involved intends to be answerable for the decision.
Source: New Zealand Taxpayers' Union
The WireThey Stacked Concrete Blocks on a Floor Until the Floor Stopped Being a Floor.
Gravity is the one regulator that never sends a warning letter, never holds an inquiry, and never accepts an undertaking as to future conduct — which is precisely why the trades that ignore it are always astonished to have been caught.
Source: HSE Media Centre
The WireThe NHS Contracts Failed and the Assets Went Sideways Into Companies He Was Connected To. He Is Barred From the Boardroom Until 2035.
The failing business is rarely emptied by strangers; it is emptied by the one man with the keys, the ledgers and a sincere private conviction that what is left belongs to him rather than to the people the company owes.
Source: The Insolvency Service (GOV.UK)
The WireAn Advocate Put the Court's Own Proceedings on YouTube Without Permission. The Court Has Started Contempt Proceedings and Told Him He May No Longer Appear by Video.
The camera is now the first instrument a man reaches for in any room he has been admitted to on trust, and the modern professional scandal is less often a betrayal for money than a betrayal for an audience of four hundred subscribers.
Source: LiveLaw
The WireShe Sat the Examination for District Judge and Found Her Marks Had Been Altered. The Remedy Is That She Must Now Sit the Interview Again.
An institution reveals what it truly believes not in its published standards but in the point at which it stops bothering to apply them, and a judiciary that cannot count marks honestly for its own entrance examination has already answered the only question about it that matters.
Source: LiveLaw
Black-Robed EgomaniaShe Livestreamed Her Own Criminal Court, Ran a Book Club on the Channel, and Let Viewers Comment in Real Time While Defendants Stood in Front of Her.
The transcript is the one part of a courtroom that outlives the judge's mood, which is why she sent it away and kept the camera; a proceeding conducted for an audience has already decided that the defendant is content rather than a party, and no denial about the comments section repairs that.
Source: KSAT / Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct
LazyTownThe Regulator Had Warned Them About the Roof Before. The Men Went Back Up Without Edge Protection. The Company's Fine Came to £4,020.
Edge protection is an afternoon of a man's time and a few lengths of steel; the alternative, chosen here more than once and on the record, is to hope that nobody falls before the inspector loses interest.
Source: HSE Media Centre
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