OFFHIRE
The bigger they are the harder they fall, as the saying goes, although not always far enough, as Rental Rate Roy discovers.
7 BILLION DIVIDED BY 14 MILLION S
ome years ago our driver was unceremoniously ushered off a Carillion site by a charmless nerk of a
site agent because we hadn’t presented him with a document signed in triplicate using virgin’s blood, written with the quill of a feather from the long extinct Dodo Bird, on parchment which had come from the same batch as that used for the dead sea scrolls.
By now, you will have come to understand that I have little respect for these self-important types, who goose-step around their sites pretending to know what they are doing, but in truth are just placed on God’s Green Earth to cause grief and dismay to the normal hardworking folk from an under-appreciated hire industry. Especially as you will see the quality of the finished article they pass off as worthy of habitation with finishes so staggeringly questionable that could be seen by Stevie Wonder at midnight during a power-cut!
Such was their focus on form filling and box ticking that they would have made a civil servant explode with unbridled glee at the pomposity and duplicitous nature of their behaviour.
However, it is not lost on me that the press has recently reported that KPMG was fined just £14.4m for (and I quote) “its audits of Carillion and Regenersis and then providing false and misleading information to the regulator and the behaviour underlying this case was wrong and should never have happened.”
So, the firm that presented itself as a doyen of quality, focus and drive, with an attention to detail which would rival that of an EU bureaucrat in Brussels, was anything but at the Carillion Accounts department. This coupled the
damning statement from the Financial Reporting Council observing; “the seriousness of the misconduct that we have found proved scarcely needs explanation.”
Where were the Panzer-driving commanders marching around the corridors of power in the Carillion offices demanding answers as to why there were cataclysmic back holes in their accounts? Was it that these gaping chasms had been filled with boxes and boxes of site forms which had been completed by suppliers up and down the land by hard pressed suppliers, a large proportion of which ended up with significant bad debts as a result of the company’s catastrophic demise?
I guess we’ll never know, but one thing is for certain – I’m sure they won’t be the last major contractor to befall a similar fate and I now have an extremely jaundiced view of the quality of work undertaken by KPMG because the size of the alleged fraud was only matched by their alleged staggering ineptitude. I hope they don’t audit any of my pension providers, or I may be forced to continue writing this column until I’m about 130! Oh, and as an aside, I ran out of beads on my abacus to work out the ratio of the size of the £14.4m fine endured by KPMG versus the size of the £7bn bankruptcy of Carillion.
The next time we’re faced with a site agent hell-bent on destroying the planet with excessive paper use, I think we’ll just thank them politely and totter off into the sunset.
Happy Hiring.
40 Executive Hire News - October 2022
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