3.11.14

I really feel sorry for the mighty midget

"Ask the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to investigate an MP’s pre-2010 expenses and here is the answer you get:
“All records relating to expenses claims before 2010 have now been destroyed. No unredacted information is now available here…”
A committee headed by the Bercow has authorised the shredding of all the evidence..."
The poor guy can't catch a break can he?

I mean if only there were some way to keep copies of these documents in a non-corporeal form which would only take up a byte-sized (sorry I slipped - I mean "bitesized", stupid typing-me) amount of space in his office - you know, like an extremely portable document format (lets call it a "pdf" for short), which he could keep on a tiny filing cabinet, perhaps disk shaped that you just need to put some electricity through to open, or "drive" it to open (lets abbreviate that to a "hard disk drive" for short).

The worst of it is that this would almost certainly be illegal for a business to do:
You must keep a record of all expenses and benefits you provide to your employees.
Your records need to show that you’ve reported accurately and your end-of-year forms are correct.
Now HMRC are vague on how long they need businesses to keep the records for (or at least don't explicitly state it on the top shelf) which to me means you should keep it indefinitely, particularly with all the tough talk we keep seeing about tax dodging and fiddling. And how about the shareholders, i.e. us? When it became apparent the vast majority of mps' were on the fiddle were we not told this would be investigated? Who investigated it? If this were a business this would be done by an external audit service who wouldn't sign off on the accounts unless they were kosher.

We clearly never got that; and I think we should start seeing the accounts ourselves.

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