I appreciate that you are investigating, if that is the right word, the situation. You are certainly taking a keen interest in the information that we have gathered.
Legal advice that was provided to the Scottish funding council highlights
“Payments made over and above basic contractual entitlement”
and
“Insufficient and inadequate paperwork”.
We have also heard about the withholding of information. The legal advice continues:
“There may be the potential to raise a claim ... around negligence and omission”.
Paragraph 25 of the section 22 report is a summary of all the serious concerns raised by the Auditor General. I am quite surprised, therefore, that when the legal advice talks about
“Enforcement by OSCR against board members”,
it says that
“Such action is likely only in exceptional cases where there is considerable financial mismanagement”.
It goes on to say:
“Even then, there is little, if no, precedent in this area meaning that any legal action would be a test case which will inevitably mean arguing over unsettled areas of law with a potentially high legal cost”
and that
“legal action may be an expensive empty victory.”
That does not paint a very good picture of rigorous enforcement by OSCR. I say that as one of the members of the Parliament who set up Scotland’s charity regulator, as a member of the Communities Committee in 2005. I was expecting a bit more.
According to that legal advice, you are dismissed as being almost toothless. These guys can get away with it because you are not very rigorous in your enforcement. Perhaps you could take advantage of being at the committee today to tell us where you have found mismanagement and misconduct in the public sector, and where you have taken the action that we expected you to take when we set up OSCR.