As our minds become increasingly boggled at the corruption that seems to be so rife in the US Federal government let us cast our minds back to the audit functions that were in place before Elon’s whizz kids started poking around in the Augean stables that are the USAID.
There is an agency called the GAO or Government Accountability Office and it claims its function is as follows …
The GAO, often called the “congressional watchdog,” is an independent, non-partisan agency that works for Congress. GAO examines how taxpayer dollars are spent and provides Congress and federal agencies with objective, non-partisan, fact-based information to help the government save money and work more efficiently.
The best one can say is that it has been extremely negligent while casting its eyes over the slush fund known as USAID. In fact it must have either been asleep on the job, staffed by people with impaired vision or up to their necks in the corruption that is being uncovered.
Lo and behold we lucky people in the UK have our own equivalent, it is called the NAO or National Audit Office. It makes its claim to fame thus …
The National Audit Office (NAO) is the UK’s independent public spending watchdog. We support Parliament in holding government to account and we help improve public services through our high-quality audits.
We are independent of government and the civil service. The Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), Gareth Davies, leads the NAO. He is an officer of the House of Commons with statutory authority to:
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audit and report on the financial accounts of all government departments and other public bodies
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examine and report on the value for money of how public money has been spent.
Our NAO says it supports the work of the Public Accounts Committee or PAC. This PAC is a parliamentary committee of MPs and oversees the work of the NAO. There follows more guff about stakeholders, a sure sign that word salad rules their minds.
The NAO makes some grandiose claims about itself, it audits all government departments and executive agencies as well as what it calls arms-length bodies and even some charities.
I have long been convinced that our rulers are as corrupt as can be but with around 1,000 years of experience of keeping us plebs in our place they have become world leading experts in keeping it all under wraps. How else can we explain decades of our standard of living being below that of our competitors in Europe for example, I know that since DEI and all that came in we have been hobbled but in my youth we did work as hard as anyone else but had little to show for it.
With the NAO and PAC involved there seems to be a lot of ways our corrupt Westminster crowd can rip us off and keep it quiet.
The NAO goes on helpfully to explain that …
We publish around 60 value-for-money reports per year. These reports are impactful, timely and relevant and respond to complex challenges facing government. We make recommendations in these reports on how government can achieve value for money and improve services.
Will you all excuse me if I express a tiny bit of scepticism about all this.
The latest story to emerge in California concerns the bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Originally priced at $45 billion, the cost has swollen to $120 billion and no sign of where the money is coming from and even less sign of rail tracks on the ground. But never fear, there has been some skulduggery where land purchases have been concerned. It is alleged that the husband of Nancy Pelosi bought some of the required land, then sold it on to the husband of Diane Feinstein who in turn sold it to the railway. One assumes that the price neither remained the same nor went down during these transactions. The Donald has said he plans to investigate. I do hope that Messers Pelosi and Feinstein along with their wives end up in jail.
Over here on our green and pleasant isle we have to wonder if the HS2 project has been similarly blighted. Its costs have also risen alarmingly while its objectives have been pared back. Wasn’t the unloved and unmissed Nobsore one of the big movers and shakers behind our High Speed project. I think his bank accounts need a serious investigation along with many others who have their fingers in this pie.
With close to £200 billion being hosed up hospital walls on our beloved NHS the scope for corruption is massive. I am always suspicious of the procurement side. You cannot supply the behemoth until you are on the approved supplier list even if you offer them stuff at much cheaper prices. We need to be wary of those who can approve you, no doubt for a consideration. The NHS famously spends more on much of what they use than would be the case if they went down to the local Tesco and bought it there. I have visions of hordes of sub-continentals sitting in NHS offices and ripping us off for millions. The tales of over supply have surfaced regularly over the years. They must have warehouses full of bandages and toilet rolls.
If Elon’s few geeks can uncover such corruption in a few days at USAID what have the GAO and NAO been up to all these years. It rather looks like the GAO just rubber stamped whatever was placed in front of it. The web of corruption must run deep.
In the UK the NAO has existed in its current form since 1983 but the function has been around much longer. An Auditor of the Exchequer was mentioned in 1314 ! Across the pond the GAO was founded in 1921 to keep an eye on the spending of Federal dollars.
Naïvety is not one of my characteristics but even cynical old me did not think the politicians and their servants were as corrupt as they seem to be. I do hope the the GAO people in USA are investigated and prosecuted and all those politicians who pontificated about the sanctity of taxpayers’ hard earned are made to eat their words before being put in the stocks.
I do wonder if anyone here will have the cojones to have a close look at our government’s profligacy with the money steal from us. I am not holding my breath. We need a cross between Milei in Argentina and Elon Musk in the USA to come and sort our finances out.
If this is the level of corruption at a national level, what horrors lurk in the local government area. As Del Boy famously said, next year we could all be millionaires.
© well_chuffed 2025
