Thursday 15 January 2009

Consultants continue to take the piss, Auditor General finds

Audit Scotland found this week that the government and associated quangos are making too much use of consultants. Robert Black, Auditor General, pausing only to adjust his big witchfinder-type hat told The JT:

"We'd like to see the government departments currently using outside expertise, to actually learn from the consultants how to do the task for themselves in future."


For example.


Whereas, in current practice when a grinning hayseed paid by us asks a consultant what the time is, the procedure followed requires the consultant to borrow the civil servant's watch and advise of the "value of the current data point within quasi-sidereal temporal measurement parameters".
The time, in other words.

In future, under Audit Scotla
nd's proposals, the consultant would simply instruct the publicly-funded half-wit in question on how to tell the time, thus obviating the need to hire a consultant every time said numptie wants to know how close it is to home time.

But a consultant we contacted unfortunately doesn't think that things would be that simple.

Pausing only to draw air sharply in through his teeth our source said:
"Yeh, tricky one that. I mean you're talking doing an initial health and safety audit, a skills set evaluation, lots of face to face meetings to agree output measures. And then, actually writing the telling the time procedure up and getting that audited. I mean I couldn't even think about looking at doing the work 'til next month at the earliest. I'm still working on that guidance on how to eat mince and tatties for the senior directorate staff. Nightmare mate, fuckin' nightmare."

Inside: Meanwhile, in an intervention that must win some prize for stating the bleedin' obvious, MSP Jeremy Purvis told the BBC that "taxpayers' money should not be wasted unnecessarily." Naw really?



Robert Black prepares to hunt down money wasters and burn them, possibly

No comments: