The Wevers report

There have been some media stories of late about the push by Martin Matthews against his forced resignation as Auditor-General due to the fraud committed by one of his direct reports when he was CE of the Ministry of Transport.

I was unhappy at the time of the resignation that the Wevers report to the Officers of Parliament Committee was not published. It was I guess part of the deal around the resignation.

But as Matthews is trying to relitigate what happened, the report is now in the public domain. It is well worth the read, and leaves me in no doubt that Matthews could not continue as Auditor-General (I have always said he would be fine for other CE roles).

Here’s some extracts:

• Matthews appointed Harrison to a direct report without advertising the role externally, as required by law
• Matthews appointed Harrison for the role despite her not having a degree, and this being listed as essential
• There was no internal audit function at MoT
• On nine occasions staff alerted Matthews of Harrison not following the rules around contracts and payments
• Two senior managers told Matthews the Victorian Police had told them Harrison was a “person of interest” to them. He just accepted her story about it.
• She told the Ministry she didn’t want her photo on the MoT website or any external documents, and this didn’t make Matthew suspicious

Once he was tipped off she had a fraud conviction:

• Took eight days to freeze her ability to approve payments
• Took 10 days to tell his Deputy CE
• Took 17 days to tell the Minister
• Took 17 days to call in the SFO

There’s also lots of detail about lack of basic controls such as Harrison allowed to both initiate and approve payments.

The best line though comes from the response by Sir Maarten to the lawyers for Matthews:

The Acting Chief Legal Adviser told me that she passed a copy of the Victorian Police enquiry over Joanne Harrison as a “person of interest” to Mr Matthews. He says he does not recall seeing the email. Even so, for Mr Matthews to convey a query of this nature to the person in question, and then take her word in response over the matter, without further checking, is a lapse of judgement. I found I was asking myself – “how many “persons of interest” inquiries does a Chief Executive normally receive from a foreign Police authority over direct report managers?” Very few I would suggest, if any at all. If a serious inquiry like this had come into another agency, my expectation is that it would have been referred immediately to the internal auditor. As we know, the Ministry of Transport did not have a such a role established.

This is a killer line. The rarity of being informed one of your direct reports is wanted by the Police is so extraordinary that of course you would initially launch an inquiry, not just ask the manager for an explanation.

I really don’t think Mr Matthews is helping himself by relitigating this issue.

Also very damning is the detailed timeline in Appendix B. It shows staff were in fact pretty diligent at quickly identifying her lack of compliance and time and time again they went to Matthews, and he did nothing substantive.