Major teething problems in the Revenue’s fraud prosecution office resulted in the dismissal of a top officer, for employing his wife, and other serious accounting irregularities including overcharging by tax counsel.
The horrors were originally uncovered when the National Audit Office examined the new department’s first accounts. The cross party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has now published into the disasters at the Revenue and Customs Prosecution Office. The Revenue and Customs Prosecution Office was in 2005 headed up by David Green, a QC, with no previous civil service experience. His department inherited shambolic systems from Customs where counsel engaged often did not submit a fee notes until years after the trial had taken place. The actual fees then payable were then subject negotiation, although how much negotiation was really possible is unclear, given the elapse of time between trial and invoice date. One set of chambers in particular, 18 Red Lion Court received the lion’s share of fees paid to counsel. This was David Green’s old chambers and the PAC was critical that a wider range of barristers were in use by the prosecution office. The PAC found that HM Treasury failed to provide adequate training for Mr Green, as chief Accounting Officer, however, describing himself as “poacher turned game keeper” he did devise new systems to control fees paid to counsel, who are now forced to account for their fees on a regular basis. Evidence submitted by the Treasury to the PAC shows that this is not the case for other government departments: controls could be as weak. Another major issue in the new department was the lack of any Human Resource (HR) policy. A new Chief Operating Officer, David Partridge, a civil servant with 40 years experience, had been appointed to assist Mr Green. Almost his first act was to appoint his wife to what turned to be £92,000 of HR consultancy work. It emerged that he had previously engaged her in £66,000 of contracts when working for the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) although this fact was not disclosed in that department’s accounts for the relevant period. Whilst the SFO contracts had been properly sanctioned by HM Treasury the new Prosecution Office contracts were not. Mr Partridge was dismissed for gross misconduct, he had not only failed to follow Treasury procurement policy, something that he should have been fully aware of, given his experience, but he also allowed himself to become the company secretary when his wife incorporated her business. Although everyone asked seemed to think that his wife did a good job and did represent value for money, as one MP pointed out that it was, “…Perhaps ironic that the first person to be dealt with under the disciplinary procedure she wrote was her husband.” The problems of the preparation of the new department’s account came to a head at the end of first year. Not only was it impossible to accrue for counsel fees – they had not fully billed them, but fees were negotiable. In one case a barrister’s fee note of £991,000 was reduced to £550,000. The accounts function was also found to be inadequately staffed and trained.