There are deep ruptures in the European Union: expansion and failing economies to name but two. One problem that the European Commission thought it had disposed of, though, was what to do with Marta Andreasen. She was sacked from her position as chief accountant in 2005 for showing disloyalty. You can’t keep a good accountant down, of course, and she returned in 2009 as a MEP for the South East of England, the Accounting and Bookkeeping College‘s constituency.
Marta Andreasen seems to be incorrigible. She was suspended from her position at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) after reporting “serious problems with its accounting system“. Encouragingly, the EU recruited her in January 2002 as budget execution director and accounting officer. There was, after all, good reason to suspect that the commission’s accounting processes might not be working properly. She was already suspended from her new job by May 2002. More recently, in 2007, she became treasurer of her adopted political party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), but that role only lasted until 2009 when she resigned over “breaches in the procedures” carried out by the party chairman.
Mrs Andreasen’s concerns these days are political questions about EU funding and expenditure which she expresses in the European Parliament’s budget committee and in her personal blog. When she was chief accountant the object of her whistle-blowing was somewhat different since it was the accounting system itself that she criticised. She felt that the computer system did not incorporate the kinds of controls that are necessary to record where the commission is spending money. This is disappointing because any accounting system that follows double-entry principles will automatically show for every transaction where the funds involved came from and where they went to. That simple discipline, it seems, was mainly absent within the EU.
Like Mrs Andreasen, every accountant should object when the organisation that they help to run fails in the fundamental bookkeeping task of recording transactions. Her political voice now sounds rather distant as she rails against absurd accounting arrangements at the EU. However, we, and our government, should listen to the more dignified language of the European Court of Auditors whose latest audit report describes “weaknesses in the accounting systems” and alerts us to the fact that payments ”are materially affected by error”. Marta Andreasen, the auditors and others have been warning us about these things for far too long.
