The damning timeline against Martin Matthews

Stuff is continuing its campaign and writes:

Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has admitted he made a mistake in 2017 when he was part of the Parliamentary committee that forced Martin Matthews to resign as auditor-general.

Matthews was forced to resign after a report by Maarten Wevers found he didn’t act soon enough to detect and respond to a $726,000 fraud at the Ministry of Transport.

What was known to few back then, and has only since come to light publicly, is that Harrison was not the unsophisticated fraudster portrayed in the Wevers report, but a sophisticated repeat offender.

It is unbelievable that Stuff report a dubious assertion as fact.

There is no dispute that Harrison is a repeat offender, but the assertion that her offending was sophisticated, implying it was impossible to detect, is laughable.

A former MOT staffer has compiled a timeline of events and MOT staff raised issues around Harrison on multiple occasions. Matthews never investigated them, he just asked her for a response and accepted it. Go read the entire timeline.

He even got told the Victorian Police wanted her as a person of interest, and accepted her lie.

Her offending was detected early on by MOT staff. Not in the sense they knew it was criminal, but in the sense proper procedures were not followed. The sort of procedures an Auditor-General wannabee should be rigorous in demanding are followed. Staff kept complaining about invoices for services that had no contract in place, and got nowhere.

There will be types of fraud that no CE could detect or be expected to detect. This was not one of those.