Tory heads should roll over this financial mess

For the second time, Brentwood Council has failed to get its accounts signed off by the Auditor and Lib Dem Leader Cllr David Kendall has branded the report as damning and deeply embarrassing to the Conservative administration. He is calling for a senior member of the administration to finally take responsibility and resign.

At the Audit Committee on 25th October members were told by the Auditor that:

• the deadline was missed
• reports were not in the correct format
• reports were not compliant with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)
• reports included inconsistencies and errors
• several disclosure notes were also missing or incomplete.

The Auditor also said:

• "These issues should have been resolved by the Council much earlier"
• "I will need to charge a significant additional audit fee on completion of the audit"
• "A lot of lessons will need to be learnt from this process".

Cllr David Kendall said:

"I believe the Conservative administration should hang their heads in shame and some senior councillors should seriously consider resigning.

"Time after time they have defended the use of consultants and interim staff saying it saves the council money. But the report clearly shows that in this case thousands of pounds has been spent on Interim staff who were not capable of producing accounts for audit that were IFRS compliant.

"Key questions need to be answered on this - we need to know who has allowed this to happen and why the Tories haven't done something about it before now. Brentwood residents deserve a full explanation for this latest financial debacle and the Lib Dems will be pushing all the way for the answers and for someone to take responsibility".