Last week saw the revelation of yet another embarrassing example of expenses mismanagement at a public body. The OFT (Office of Fair Trading), the Government quango with a “mission to make markets work well for consumers”, has signed off on an £80.00 bill for entertaining business contacts at the Nottingham branch of Hooters.
This is clearly out of step with the economic squeeze and
politics of our times. To most, Hooters, an American-themed grill, where the Burger Bar meets The Benny Hill Show (if you’re old enough to remember it) is an inappropriate place to spend taxpayers’ money. Anyway you dress it up (or not!), Hooters uses women’s breasts as a marketing tool to shift burgers and chicken wings.
To some it may seem that the biggest misdemeanour here is that the worker committed the cardinal sin of leaving a paper trail for this activity, and in the grand scheme of inappropriate sex-related business expenses it ranks low down the offences list.
However, others make the observation that we are in an age of progressive gender politics; how can women redress the balance in the boardroom when the sexual objectification of their gender is supported by a Government body?
These are important issues but they are something of a sideshow that obscures the underlying failings. From the serious perspective of expenses management there are two real issues. Firstly, the OFT seems to lack a sufficiently robust expenses policy that guides workers and ensures that expenditure is consistent and appropriate.
The second is that if we examine the summary spreadsheet for 2010 – 11 as published on the Taxpayers’ Alliance website, it reveals that there is an ‘unspecified’ expenditure on ‘unspecified’ hotels of £57,091.47, which is 16% of the total spent on OFT’s Government Procurement Cards – publicly funded credit cards.
In any organisation, if expenses are to provide transparency and return value to the bottom line, then policy must be robust and explicit and ‘unspecified’ expenses categories must be eliminated.
Have you seen Expense On Demand’s quick expense policy guide? Click here, it’s free to download.
John Timpson is the Chief Executive of Timpson the high street key cutting and shoe/watch repair business. He is a regular contributor to The Telegraph dishing up management advice as ‘straight talking, common sense from the front line’.
