How on earth does a council stuff up so badly on financial reporting when:
- There’s supposed to be an audit committee that oversees everything?
- Strategic Resource Plans are worked on for months and months – presumably?
- The CEO has been part of the Advisory Committee that set up the standards (See: http://www.dtpli.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/244867/Directions_Paper_-_Local_Government_Performance_Reporting_Framework_December_2012.pdf
- The budget and SRP has already been tabled, so why has it taken 3 months to discover the errors?
This is all about Item 9.12 of the current agenda where we find the following unbelievable admission –
On assessing the financial indicators as part of the end-of-year accounts review, officers identified a number of formulaic inconsistencies and errors in the indicators listed in Council’s Strategic Resource Plan compared with the calculations in the LGPRF template.
To ensure consistency with the Local Government Performance Reporting calculations, officers have recalculated the financial indicators and have reproduced these (refer attached). They will be updated in Council’s Strategic Resource Plan.
So readers may judge for themselves the magnitude of these errors, we ask them to compare the ‘original’ SRP (passed and accepted without question by our wide awake councillors) and the current version. Simply click on each image to enlarge. We do apologise for the quality of the images – that of course is dependent on the formats that council chooses to publish its material. Otherwise readers should go directly to the minutes of these council meetings.
CIRCA MAY/JUNE 2015
AUGUST VERSION
Glen Eira Debates 
August 9, 2015 at 1:18 PM
anything Lipshutz is involved in, will be a stuff-up, the man is a walking disaster
August 9, 2015 at 8:30 PM
I don’t pretend to understand all the figures or those I could make out. However changing something a few months later when there should be many avenues for double checking and gazillions of staff and expensive computer investments and all of this didn’t pick up the mistakes straight off is a poor showing. Makes me wary and thinking what other mistakes are there hidden away.
August 10, 2015 at 8:40 PM
If the numbers in the tables are illegible then the report is pointless. And the numbers ARE illegible. They needn’t be, but somebody has chosen YET AGAIN to scan documents as JPEG images, which is an inappropriate format for text and line diagrams. Surely Council has IT folk that can help raise the technical proficiency of the administration.