"TAGS" ON BALANCE-SHEETS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 8535, 16 March 1908, Page 4

"TAGS" ON BALANCE-SHEETS.

In recent years the Audit Office has made a practice of* "tagging" the balance-sheets of local bodies. That is to say, when any item of expenditure by a Borough or County Council, or a Road Board, is not approved by the Auditor-General, a statement that the payment is illegal is affixed to the balance-sheets. .These tags have been quite frequent of. late, and one local body, the Selwyn County Council, had more than a dozen appended to its financial statement. The point about the matter is that the tags serve no good purpose. They are jxist ignored by the local bodies, the Selwyn Council, for instance, taking no action in regard to the matter, though some of the councillors expressed annoyance at the Auditor-General's action. Mr Witty, M.P., said " the Audit Office was ' tagging ' everything—there was scarcely a single thing it did not tag. It might be a junior in the office who was doing it. The duty of the Audit Office was to' ascertain whether the money had been spent according to tl)e balance-sheet; it had nothing to do with the law, though an error might be pointed out. Yet this 'tagging' went on year after year." We cannot agree with MrWitty's view of the Auditor-General's duties. He, without a doubt, is the official who should censor local bodies' accounts, and should disallow illegal expenditure. If he is only to be satisfied that the money has been spent as indicated, there would be very little check on prodigal local bodies, who could spend the ratepayers' money in all sorts of extravagances. Some officer should be charged with the duty of seeing that public funds are only spent in legal ways, and who can better undertake the work than the Auditor-General? The trouble is that " tagging '* is not an effective method of expressing disapproval, and some more forcible means should b.e taken of indicating to local bodies that they are exceeding legal bounds.