Folly of the DaySix Councils Declared They Could No Longer Balance Their Books. Over the Same Years They Paid £207.7 Million to Consultants — Money Spent Hiring Strangers to Explain Money.
The defence the councils offer is the interesting part, because it is sincere and it is an admission. We do not have every skill in-house, says the body whose entire purpose is to hold the skills. That sentence, spoken calmly by an organisation which has just informed its residents it cannot pay for what it promised them, is the whole diagnosis: an institution that has quietly redefined itself from a thing that does the work into a thing that commissions the work, and then discovers there is no floor beneath it. Note that the spending did not stop when the money did. It could not stop, because by then nobody inside the building knew how to do the job without a firm to ask, and the firms were the only people left who could explain why the accounts would not balance. This is not corruption and it is not even quite waste. It is a species of learned helplessness, purchased at £207.7m and billed to the people who were told there was nothing left.
Source: The Telegraph
The WireA Hospital Trust's Director of Engineering Faked a Doctorate, a Master's, a Bachelor's Degree and a Diploma. The Anti-Corruption Commission's Verdict Was Four Words: He Was Not Qualified.
Four qualifications is the detail that gives the game away. One forged degree is a lie told to get through a door; four is a man who has decided the paper is the profession. And the institution agreed with him for thirteen years, because the institution was also reading the paper rather than the work — which is how a hospital ends up with a director of engineering who cannot engineer, appointed by a process designed to detect exactly that and looking, throughout, directly at it.
Source: ABC News
The WireThe Department of Transportation Cannot Get Its Own Staff Across Town. Eighty-Nine Per Cent of Its 189 Office Buildings Fall Below the Occupancy Floor Congress Set.
There is a joke here and the government wrote it: the department responsible for moving Americans from one place to another cannot move its own employees to their desks. But the better line is quieter. Congress had to legislate a number — sixty per cent — to describe a building being used, which means someone in Washington concluded that the concept of an occupied office required a statutory definition. Nine in ten buildings then failed it, and the department's response was to keep paying the rent, because an empty building costs a department nothing it can feel and admitting it is empty costs it a floor.
Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office
The WireA Council Chief Executive Took Personal Control of the Refit of the Council House He Lived In. The Bill Went From $200,000 to $460,000, and the Auditor-General Found He Had Edited the Quotes.
Every safeguard in local government exists to prevent precisely one thing: the person who benefits from the decision also making it. Here the man who lived in the house ran the tender for the house and typed some of the paperwork for the house, and did so in the open, for months, on an island of six hundred people where he was the most conspicuous official there was. Concealment was never attempted because concealment never occurred to him — which is the reliable signature of the confident fool, who does not hide the thing because he has not yet grasped that it is a thing.
Source: RNZ
The WireAn App Sold You a Number Out of Ten for Your Own Face and Promised You Would 'NEVER Look Unattractive Again'. The Regulator Asked to See the Evidence and There Was None.
The fraud is not the retouching. It is the decimal point. A 5.4 rising to a 9.8 asserts that the human face is a quantity, that the quantity is knowable to one place after the point, and that the difference between a person at 5.4 and the same person at 9.8 is a purchasable four and four tenths. Vanity has always been sold a mirror; what is new is that it now comes with a readout, and that the readout was the one part of the advertisement nobody thought to ask for proof of — including, until September, the customers.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
The WireThe University Spent £231,588 on a New Logo While Opening a Voluntary Severance Scheme. Its Lawyers Then Declined to Say What Rolling the Logo Out Would Cost.
The refusal to estimate the rollout is the confession. A university is an institution for the production and testing of knowledge, and this one has just told an inquirer, through solicitors, that it cannot know a number it will shortly spend, on the ground that the number will be spread across departments — which is not ignorance but a filing arrangement, and one chosen precisely because it produces ignorance. The undergraduate's remark is the sharper piece of analysis in the whole affair, and it cost the university nothing, which may be why it was not commissioned.
Source: The Boar
The WireA Council Paid €151,475 to Be Told Its Residents Did Not Know What It Did, Then Set Aside Another €150,000 to Put the Answer on Signs.
Over a thousand people were asked and they said, in effect, that they did not know what the council was for. The council read this and concluded that the problem was the logo. There is a whole theory of modern administration in that inference: that the gap between an institution and the public it serves is a presentational one, closable by a typeface, rather than a report on what the institution has actually been doing while nobody could tell. The consultation was accurate and the diagnosis was reversed, at €151,475, with €150,000 committed to printing it.
Source: The Echo
The WireThe Emails Said Twenty Per Cent Off Everything. They Also Said Sitewide. The Regulator Has Had to Rule, in Writing, That Everything Includes the Things.
Somebody in that marketing department knew. You cannot write the word sitewide, and then write the exclusion list, and remain innocent of the relationship between them; the exclusion list is the proof that the meaning was understood before the promise was made. What has been extracted here at public expense is not a lesson but a definition — a regulator obliged to put on the record that everything is a word with a settled meaning, for the benefit of an industry that had begun to treat that as an open question.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
Black-Robed EgomaniaShe Went and Got the Evidence Herself, Then Used It on the Witness. The Supreme Court Called It a Wide Range of Frequent and Persistent Overreach and Excess.
A judge who investigates is not being diligent; she is being a party. The whole architecture of the bench rests on the judge knowing only what has been put before her in the open, precisely so that both sides can see the material that will decide them — and the moment she goes and finds her own, she has become the best-informed advocate in the room and the only one nobody may cross-examine. What makes it egomania rather than error is the reluctance the Court had to name twice: not that she overreached, but that having been shown the reach, she could not see it. The robe had persuaded her that her curiosity was the same thing as the law.
Source: KTBS 3 News