Work
Substantial sums of money had to be issued to officers such as the Treasurer of the Navy and the Paymaster-General of HM Forces. The auditors were responsible for seeing that these officers expended the money issued to them for the purposes intended.
The system operated was defective. The auditors did not audit the actual expenditure of the departments administering the army and navy. Nor was there any mechanism for ensuring that accounts were presented and passed promptly. Indeed the system actually encouraged abuses. The officers accounting frequently had large sums of money in hand, which they were able to invest until it needed to be spent. Thus a person no longer in office, but with a balance in hand had no incentive to pay it back in to the Exchequer. Furthermore, an ancient Statute (51 Henry III, c.5) required that accounts should be cleared in order. This meant that work on auditing a later officer's account could not even begin until that of his predecessor had received its acquittance (Quietus).
The result was that Henry Fox (Lord Holland from 1763), who had been Paymaster-General of Forces between 1757 and 1765 did not have his accounts audited until 1778, 23 years later, during which time he was estimated to have received £250,000 in interest.
Read more about this topic: Auditor Of The Imprests
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“The woman and the genius do not work. Up to now, woman has been mankind’s supreme luxury. In all those moments when we do our best, we do not work. Work is merely a means to these moments.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Heaven has its business and earth has its business: those are two separate things. Heaven, that’s the angels’ pasture; they are happy; they don’t have to fret about food and drink. And you can be sure that they have black angels to do the heavy work like laundering the clouds or sweeping the rain and cleaning the sun after a storm, while the white angels sing like nightingales all day long or blow in those little trumpets like they show in the pictures we see in church.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“God made integers, all else is the work of man.”
—Leopold Kronecker (1823–1891)