This evidence was published on Parliament's web site with a note that it may be quoted but it should be made clear that it is not yet corrected by witnesses and therefore may not stand in its presently published form.
The National Audit Office will not consider complaints that the Audit Commission is misusing public money to purchase data processing which it then puts false and prejudicial interpretations upon. Yes, I did try.
I leave the most interesting point until last, since that is the order it came in in the original evidence.
Questions are raised of good governance. Given the maladministration arising from the fact that local council audit teams and many elected representatives rely on the legally false allegations made about identifiable persons via the Audit Commission's hitherto secret 'Audit Guide' relating to the SPD matches, the whole concept is in my eyes something of a sick joke.
They then go on to whistle blowing, another somewhat sick joke, since nobody asks who will blow the whistle on the Auditors if, as the Audit Commission demonstrably has done in respect of what it alleges is 'financial information' relating to hundreds of thousands of taxpayers, false and financially and administratively incorrect allegations are made about taxpayers.
So far from addressing this issue, we have another 'audit' person vaunting his independence.
There are all sorts of problems when you made 'auditors' beyond democratic control. They grab the electoral register and use it as the basis for false allegations about registered voters, for example, a blow at the heart of democracy.
I realise that this is not the precise context in which these points are being made, but the point remains wholly valid. For when they go on to discuss fees being 'beefed up' the precise point applies because the NFI has alleged that the non existent 'inconsistencies' which it falsely alleges exist between CT data and the electoral register are found AT THE COST OF THE LOCAL COUNCIL. And it is not just Audit Commission fees which get beefed up, the credit reference agencies are making a lot of money out of this SCAM. In fact, they appear to be more or less the only people who DO actually gain anything out of it, though they also gain politically through having driven a coach and horses through a number of basic principles of our legal and social system and the increasing normalisation of evidence free statistically based fraud investigations based on 'intelligence' that a person might be a thief which they earn money out of providing.
And now for the BIG BIT
I see the control of fraud as an executive function and not the function of an independent auditor. Although I am supportive and I wish it well and want to see it in a good place, I don’t think the place is with us, for that reason.
But the arguments that the Audit Commission (before the law was altered via the Serious Crimes Bill) could have the full electoral register was precisely that it was an audit function. So put briefly Mr Morse would have to agree that the Audit Commission was never entitled to this data in the first place and that nor are appointed auditors.
Perhaps it is for this reason that the Chair of the Sub Committee looked somewhat gob smacked at this point? I hope that the implications of what she had just been told were clear to her, but maybe she is not sufficiently up to speed with the issues to realise this.
Given that we are now clear that the AC thought the electoral register was a document relating to the accounts of the council because it got both electoral and council tax law wrong (see for example the accounts of barristers Timothy Pitt Payne and Clive Lewis) this is even clearer indication that something was very rotten in the state of Denmark (or wherever the Audit Commission was at the time).
I think Peter Yetzes has a lot to answer for. But I don't think that anybody will ever get round to making him justify what he has done.
Mr Pickles talks about data sharing between local and central government. I wonder how well any council tax data shared in this way is described. Does central government make the same sort of mistake that Audit Commission staff have made over the years? One has to hope not, but one cannot have much faith.
Mr Morse's comment is fed to Mr Pickes:
Q667 Mr Bacon: You will agree with the CAG’s comment, which you may not have heard, that he regarded the NFI, which he strongly supports, as an executive function, and that therefore the NAO would be an inappropriate home for it.
Eric Pickles: I have never in my wildest dreams thought it should come to the NAO, so he can rest safer in his bed tonight.
Q668 Chair: Okay. So we will make a recommendation to you, but you are aware of it and you will take it up.
Eric Pickles: Yes, absolutely.
One can only wonder precisely what Mr Pickes will be taking up here: probably not the point that if it is not an audit function what the hell was the Audit Commission playing at for all those years grabbing people's personal data?