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Full marks for the voice of Paul Gray
April 2007
Mike Hodge, International Trade Today
Double entry accounting had never been taught to the Commission’s accounting staff. The Court of Auditors described the accounts as a maze of meaningless figures.
Not that I was thinking of applying – because I am absolutely certain that I wouldn’t get past first post – but HM Revenue & Customs is still looking for a chairman since Sir David Varney stepped down some six months ago. I read in a well-known right wing paper that a Commons committee has branded the department as ‘rudderless’ as MPs are singularly disappointed that the stand-in replacement, Paul Gray, is still standing-in.
Michael Fallon, the Conservative chairman of the Commons Treasury Sub-Committee, has written to the Treasury asking when the post will be filled. It would seem that this committee was told four months ago that the vacancy would be filled ‘soon’. ‘Soon’, of course, is a very interesting word and it can be used in a wide variety of ways.
Paul Gray is, as I have said before, a completely different sort of person from his predecessor. Very little is heard from him and his public persona is almost entirely absent. Having said that, one of my pals is a retired accountant and does a number of non-executive jobs for which he receives fees. There has been an issue, I understand, about tax and national insurance. I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of all this but I gather my friend had to pay some additional tax and then claim it all back somehow – all entirely legal and above board.
He wrote a letter to the relevant tax folk and asked whether all this bureaucracy for no tax or revenue gain was worth it and he copied this letter to Paul Gray. A few days later while down in the West Country putting up fence posts for his son, his mobile phone rang. The call was from Paul Gray, who had taken the trouble to ring and say, whilst he quite agreed with the sentiments expressed in the letter, the law was the law.
So, it is reassuring to know that the acting chairman of HMR&C is taking his job seriously. It’s a pity that my elder son didn’t copy Paul Gray in on his attempts to get a tax refund from HMR&C. I mentioned this in an article two or three months ago – the issue has been rumbling on for ages. Anyway, the lad has now given up the ghost and emigrated to New Zealand so Chancellor Brown has ‘won’ another battle.
Talking of battles, I was absolutely horrified to read a recent article about Marta Andreasen, who was made the EC’s chief accountant in 1999. You may remember that, in that year, the whole European Commission resigned over a corruption scandal. Marta was the first accountant in the post; the predecessors had included such likely bean counters as an engineer and an architect!
I should think those folk were about as much use as getting my labrador to look after the housekeeping. However, when Marta got her accounting nose into the books, she was so appalled that she refused to sign the accounts.
Now, one might expect the Commission to be very grateful to have a very loud whistle blown but Marta’s reward was an immediate suspension from her duties. Her marching orders were given by Neil Kinnock, who was, at that stage, the vice president, appointed by the Commission responsible for cleaning up the shambles. To quote Marta, she said the EU accounts were ‘an Augean stable of untraceable payments and myriad bank accounts with no ascertainable controls or signatories’.
A Scottish accountant who heard of Marta’s demise decided to download the 139 pages of the EC’s 2005 accounts together with the Court of Auditors’ report running to 228 pages. It transpired that it was well nigh impossible to discover where most of the billions of euros had either come from or gone to.
One interesting statistic that can be dug out of the accounts is that the average salary of the Commission’s 22,657 employees is €159,465. Not a bad little earner, I hear you say. Lord Kinnock is now retired from his 10-year stint with the Commission. His pension from his grateful employer is around £175,000 a year.
I remember Kinnock taking up his post with a great deal of trumpeting and posturing, saying that he, on his own, would sort out the finances of the Commission. Well, Marta rightly blew the whistle but was subsequently sent off the field.
The Commission also seems to wield enormous power when it comes to protecting the system from investigation. In the middle of January this year, Ashley Mote (a British MEP) tried to ask Marta Andreasen’s successor, Brian Gray (who was appointed by Kinnock) some detailed and relevant questions that arose from Marta’s outspoken criticism.
It would seem that the rest of the committee decided that an early end to the discussion was much more appropriate than answering the questions. Therefore, Ashley Mote (and the rest of us) is none the wiser.
I guess none of this would really matter if it wasn’t for the fact that British taxpayers (or ‘customers’ as HMR&C would have us called) gave £15bn pounds to the EU in 2005. I work that out at £300 per head if all the inhabitants in the UK are taxpayers – which they aren’t. So, maybe £1000 per head?
Whatever – it is an absolute disgrace that the EU accounts have not been signed off for 12 years in a row. Every public company in the EU has to prepare and present an annual balance sheet and audited set of accounts. There are strict rules and heavy fines for noncompliance.
The EU, our lords and masters, produce no accounts and break all the rules. And we give them £15bn to spend. Am I the only one who thinks this is an outrage?
