When Plaid’s Leanne Wood was quoted as questioning why a Wales Audit Office high-flyer aged 50 had left on an early retirement package worth over £600K, a few eyebrows were raised but not much else.
Since then, Assembly members have been queuing up to question the handsome payoff awarded to Anthony Snow, who was chief operating officer at the public spending watchdog. Some even want the deal overturned on hearing that Mr Snow joined the Financial Reporting Council, an independent standards regulator, in November last year.
The Wales Audit Office (formerly the Audit Commission in Wales) employs around 260 people in the Cardiff headquarters and throughout Wales. Snow was quite a high-profile individual and was often seen accompanying his former boss, Jeremy Colman at various events. Many of the AMs demanding answers would have questioned Mr Snow at Audit committee meetings and several have regularly chatted with him at various receptions & events. A few would even have been councillors when their local authorities were reviewed by the bean-counter and one of his governance teams.
Yet none of them have highlighted the bullying at the WAO which was widely reported a year ago, or the identity of the main culprits and who was in overall charge of the affected staff. Similarly, there is no mention of the widely held view expressed at the time, and since, that Snow had been “bought-off” and shipped out. We assume the reticence is because opinion remains divided over the actual reasons.
Yet, as one insider mentioned just a few months ago, the Auditor General who has since fallen from grace was known to play favourites to an embarrassing degree “if you were ‘in’ then you were definitely ‘in’ but otherwise you ended up in Carmarthen” is the phrase he used. But more to the point, this exact situation was also widely known among ministers and backbench AMs at the time. So why is it only now, when it appears too late to actually do anything, do the politicians start talking about an adequate redress?
1 Comments:
There is a lot more to this than just a golden goodbye. The regime under Colman was basically patronage dressed up as performance evaluation and would had have continued had the Auditor General not been arrested for possessing indecent images.
Assembly members who now express concern should track the pattern of promotions and dismissals (transfers) within the WAO during the last five years in order to gain a true picture.
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