September 19, 2026 — Accused of Misconduct by His Own Regulator, He Filed a Defence…

Folly of the Day

Accused of Misconduct by His Own Regulator, He Filed a Defence Citing Cases That Do Not Exist. When the Regulator Pointed This Out, He Replied With More of Them.

He did not lie to the tribunal — he simply declined to find out whether what he was saying was true, which he had evidently stopped regarding as part of the job; and when told the machine had invented his law, he asked the machine what to do about it, because the alternative was to admit that the thinking had been outsourced some time ago.

Source: Legal Futures

The Wire

The Federal Programme That Teaches Factories How to Stop Wasting Money Spent $62,954 on Promotional T-Shirts and About $100,000 on a Conference and a Groundbreaking Ceremony.

Efficiency is the easiest thing in the world to sell and the hardest thing in the world to practise, which is why the people paid to explain it to others so reliably turn out to have been holding a groundbreaking ceremony for themselves.

Source: WOSU Public Media

The Wire

A Film Grant Capped at $2.8 Million Was Paid Out at $5 Million. A $30,000 Grant Was Paid Twice. More Than Half the Files Had No Signed Agreement at All.

Nobody stole this money; it was simply handed over by people who had constructed, with great care and at public expense, a system in which no individual was ever required to be the one who checked.

Source: Canadian Taxpayers Federation

The Wire

He Decided Hybrid Working Meant Any Hemisphere. His Employer Had His Access-Card Records and His IP Address, and the Adjudicator Called Him the Author of His Own Predicament.

An employer that issues you a swipe card and a laptop has, in the same motion, issued itself a record of where you are; the remarkable thing is not that he was caught but that a man employed by one of the four largest accountancy firms on earth did not expect anyone to add it up.

Source: DLA Piper (Workplace Relations Commission)

The Wire

The Regulator Found £22 Million Had Been Turned Into Cash Across 105 Charities by the Simple Method of Writing the Cheques Blank.

A blank cheque is not an accounting failure but an accounting decision — the deliberate construction of a gap in the record where a name ought to go — and the only real surprise is how long it took anyone to add the gaps together.

Source: Charity Commission for England and Wales

The Wire

The Brewer Advertised Ninety Minutes of Unlimited Beer for £19.95 and Illustrated It With Twelve Drinks in Rapid Succession. It Now Says It Will Introduce Additional Code Training.

The advertisement was banned for suggesting that drinking twelve pints in ninety minutes might alter a person's physical condition, a proposition the brewer had spent money to assert and now spends money to deny.

Source: The Morning Advertiser

The Wire

The Inspectors Served Him Notice After Notice. He Filed Them. The Prosecution Asked the Court to Disqualify Him as a Director Altogether.

An enforcement notice is the regulatory state at its most patient: it does not fine you, it tells you what to do and waits — and a man who can ignore that repeatedly has concluded not that the rule is wrong but that it is addressed to somebody else.

Source: Health and Safety Executive

The Wire

He Moved £2.98 Million Out of the NHS Waste Firm and Into Two Companies He Ran With His Wife, Having Been Advised He Needed the Bank's Consent and Not Having It.

The advice he received was not complicated and not ambiguous; it was simply inconvenient, which in the mind of a certain kind of director is a species of technicality that the consequences would surely respect.

Source: LexisNexis (Insolvency Service)

The Wire

He Was the Sole Director, the Transport Manager and the Driver. When the Hours Ran Out He Used a Former Employee's Tachograph Card, Which Recorded Him Doing It.

The tachograph exists precisely to remember what the driver would prefer to forget, so a man defeating it by feeding it a second identity has not outwitted the machine — he has merely given it a fuller account of his character.

Source: GOV.UK / Office of the Traffic Commissioner

Black-Robed Egomania

A Member of Court Staff Disagreed With Her About the Proceedings. She Shouted at the Woman for Undermining Her Authority, Which Is Not What Authority Is.

Authority that can be undermined by a clerk disagreeing with you was never authority; it was a seat, and the whole purpose of the lay magistracy is to be filled by people who can tell the difference.

Source: Judicial Conduct Investigations Office

LazyTown

Three E-Learning Modules Stood Between Him and Remaining a Magistrate. He Did Not Do Them, and Then Did Not Answer the Letters Asking Why Not.

He gave up the right to sentence his neighbours rather than sit through three videos about how to do it, which at least settles the question of how seriously he took either.

Source: Judicial Conduct Investigations Office