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:
“We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“It is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)