A Man Must Eat ...

Entertaining (meaning eating and drinking) is pretty much crucial to succeeding in business, and politics, and journalism, and PR, and publishing, and so on. If you are Head of the National Audit Office as well as Comptroller and Auditor General of the United Kingdom, however, you have to make sure that you are not open to bribery. Not easy therefore to accept those invitations to wine and dine unless you are footing the bill. Sir John Bourn was obliged to resign after it was revealed that he had spent £27,000 on restaurant bills over three years, and £370,000 in travel. That equates to around £175 a week on food and drink. Easily done, I would have thought.

Fortunately Sir John's resignation does not take effect until next year which is good
for two reasons. The first, as James Kirkup points out in today's Telegraph, it enabled him to authorise the quick release of the emails which go a long way to explaining the process which led to the two notorious 'child benefits' CD-ROMs being lost; and secondly it gives a bit of extra momentum to his recently published book, Public Sector Auditing. There's a lot of good stuff in the book - the chapter headed Why Bureaucracy will Never Work kicks off with "Public Programmes are Often Late, Cost More than Planned and do not Work as Intended". Subsequent chapters deal with risk, vulnerability to fraud, theft and corruption, and, under the heading of Programme and Project Management - Bureaucracies' Weakest Link there is a warning about concentrating on lowest price rather than best outcome. All relevant stuff.

It might be argued that Sir John's publishers, John Wiley, should pick up some of the £370,000 travel costs that . After all his book is international in scope and includes examples of auditing from the US (visited 3 times), Canada (1), China (1), India (1) and Australia .