8.—20.

The Audit Office requires one of the officers of the Department of Mines, a Mining Warden, to sign and send in a statement which may serve for a desirable check of certain pecuniary transactions of other officers of the department; and to a compliance with the requirements such objections as are offered in the foregoing memorandum are not thought unworthy of being raised—namely, the extra labour of signing a monthly return, and the vitiation of a statutory return by the signature being affixed to it of the officer required to cause it to be furnished or forwarded. If the signature is thought to be a violation, the department has only to request the officer to furnish an additional statement. Bth February, 1897. J. K. Warburton.

Memorandum for the Controller and Auditor-General. The Under-Secretary for Mines is in error when he says " the statute merely requires Wardens to cause abstracts of licensed holdings to be furnished," &c. Section 76 of " The Mines Act, 1891," directs that " copies or abstracts of all licenses " shall be forwarded monthly to the Minister. It certainly has been the practice of the Mines Department to transmit these abstracts to the Audit Office, and I would point out that without them it would be impossible to audit the accounts of the Eeceivers of Gold Eevenue, as from them the " Eegister of Leases issued under Mining Acts " is compiled; but after the register has been written up there is no reason why the abstracts should not be returned to the Mines Department if so desired. The "Abstract of Occupation Licenses," being obsolete, can only be a "Nil" return, and Mining Eegistrars who are aware of its repeal do not use it. Bth February, 1897. C. E. Bbiggs.

Enclosure 4 in No. 1. The Under-Secretary, Mining Department. I regret that my desire to obtain for the purposes of audit a Warden's certified statement of licenses issued should have occasioned you any annoyance, or put you to the trouble of writing your memorandum of the 6th instant. A requirement easier to satisfy or more reasonable is rarely made. A statement signed by the Warden is desired. The Warden as a statutory officer already causes a statement to be sent in. If, consistently with the statutory duty, the Warden can sign that statement, there is nothing more to do. If he cannot do so, (?) you would, I presume, instruct him to sign and send in a separate statement, and thus resolve the little difficulty. The instruction would not appear to be necessary to more than the one Warden. How can there justly arise out of such a simple requirement any occasion for the formal declaration that it would be " unbecoming on your part to issue any instruction to Wardens as to the manner in which they should perform their statutory duties " ? But though there could have been no idea of such interference, the officers who are directed by statute to cause a statement to be sent in will generally regard it, as all the Wardens but one evidently have regarded it, to be a fault that the statement should neither be signed by them nor bear any evidence of having been seen by them. The relevancy of the third paragraph of your memorandum is not clear to me. In declining to prepare the statement which your department was recently called upon to furnish, I thought it superfluous to explain that, as statements, returns, and accounts required from the department may have to be audited, it is not appropriate that the Audit Office should prepare them; and there appeared no reason to suppose that you were not studying the convenience of your office by leaving the returns in comparatively good order in a room a few yards from your own in the same building. I do not like to make any remarks on the assumption that you can really mean what the paragraph appears to literally imply—that, because I was unable to comply with your request, " it will probably be more desirable" to withhold the returns from audit inspection. It maybe that your intention was to express no more than my own conviction, that it would be proper for the department to keep, and for the Audit Office to restrict itself to examining, the accounts which the Audit Office is now keeping, and uses the returns to compile, and that, in the meantime, the returns should, after the compilation, be sent back to the department. But in any case, the application of your third paragraph to the modest requirement of the Audit Office for nothing more than a certified statement from the Wardens is not understood. J. K. Warburton, Audit Office, 9th February, 1897. Controller and Auditor-General.

Enclosure 5 in No. 1. Audit Query No. 755, on the 12th [11th] December, 1896.— Re Letter from Audit Office, dated 2nd February, 1897. :;: Sic, — Greymouth, sth February, 1897. I have the honour to enclose a letter from the Auditor-General, who addressed me as " the Mining Warden," drawing my attention to section 31, " Public Eevenues Act, 1891 " ; but as I am not a Eeceiver-General nor Paymaster-General, nor an accountant, nor any other person ejusdem generis under that Act, there can be no privity between the Auditor-General and myself. I have therefore to request that you will be kind enough to explain to the Auditor-General that, in accordance with the rules of the service, I can only correspond with the head of my own department. The Audit query ho refers to was sent to you by me on the 26th January last, with my letter No. 9. Would you be good enough to convey to the Auditor-General that no disrespect is meant in my declining to correspond directly with him, nor antagonism in not complying with his request.

* No Audit Office letter can be traced in the Audit Office of this date.

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