AUDITORS SLAM COUNCIL BOOKS

By Rigid Apoplexy

CRUMBERLAND Council continues to sit on long-overdue accounts while missing important LEGAL deadlines – resulting in ANOTHER serious kick up the arse from outside auditors.

External beancounters Grant Thornton are now making plans to send in its troops later this year to nursemaid nerve-shattered Council staff through the auditing process – all at vast expense to Cumberland’s taxpayers, naturally.

(It appears that the Labour-led authority has a somewhat ‘Parisian’ attitude to statutory timescales.)

The external intervention comes because the new Council has failed “to comply” with a number of statutory deadlines relating to a raft of rotting local authority accounts left behind by the old regimes.

As a consequence of all this, Crumberland Council now has some explaining to do to the Secretary of State for Local Government, Angela Rayner MP.

(The Deputy Prime Minister and Chief Elections Canceller will no doubt give the authority an over-generous hearing given that it’s a Labour Council).

THE dog’s breakfast of Council accounts all stems from Local Government Disorganisation here in Crumbria.

The incoming Council’s finance team had to pick up the ageing books of outgoing councils Allerdale, Copeland and Carlisle, some of which were already long overdue.

The accounting mess has caused a huge blockage in the financial pipeline and it’s all descended into farce because of the way all the different councils in the county kept their records.

(Needle in a haystack time.)

With some poor finance staff at Crumberland apparently calling it a day (who can blame them), it has also meant that expensive “external” support has had to be bought in – all paid for by you.

Cumberland’s OWN council accounts for the year 2023-24 were due on January 16th this year.

They too have failed to show up on time. Another example of basic services not being delivered.

Incredibly, four years of Copeland Borough Council accounts remain well past their smell-by-date.

(Imagine a private sector business trying this on with the Taxman?)

That means red-pen men at Grant Thornton cannot say for certain that all has been tickety-boo on the public money front.

Grant Thornton has even made veiled mentions to Cumberland Council of the National Audit Office and the Financial Reporting Council.

Interpretation?

Solids are v. close to hitting extractor.

AND the Auditors have just handed big wigs at Crumberland Council a devastatingly low opinion of its so-called Value for Money.

(Possible conclusion – it isn’t!)

GT found six “SIGNIFICANT WEAKNESSES” at Crumberland Council and has made FIVE key recommendations.

So scorching is the auditors’ “Interim Annual Report” that the notoriously secretive Democratic People’s Republik of North & West Kumbria have decided that its Audit Committee should talk about it only behind closed doors.

The shy Council will use 53-year-old legislation this week to keep the scathing report in-house.

It will be debated in “Part B” – far from the interfering eyes of the Press & Public.

Crumberland’s audit committee is chaired by Labour councillor Lucy Patrick.

They want you to think there is nothing to see here.

And the little lapdogs on our local media generally just roll over and report what unidentified Council spokespeople tell them to report.

So the Council hierarchy has nothing to worry about when it comes to being asked hard questions about its accounting practices.

Cumbria’s traditional local “newspapers” with the word Cumberland in their mastheads have been pig-headedly uncurious about keeping readers in the picture with the latest auditing shenanigans at the Labour Council.

Instead, our uninterested weeklies filled their most recent front pages with Council Press Releases and Labour MP statements cheerleading for Devolution and Cumbria having a bright new shiny Mayor imposed on it.

Devolution involves MILLIONS and MILLIONS of pounds of public money from Whitehall being funnelled through the self-same Local Authority councillors and finance ‘experts’ that Grant Thornton is having trouble with!

What could possibly go wrong!