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Sunday, Feb 23, 2014 - 22:42 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

No Adverse Effects

Break out the popcorn - the past weeks have seen a steady stream of hatchet jobs in the mainstream media on the subject of the Workers' Party's newly-merged Aljunied-Hougang-Punggol East Town Council's accounts. Essentially, the independent auditors couldn't make some numbers add up, returning a "qualified/disclaimer of opinion", which the WP explained was due to handover issues (plausible, given how... lively the process was - remember the AIM affair?)

Caught up in a storm of righteous fury for the public good, the incumbents hastened to explain why they didn't clamp down on those nefarious men in blue sooner, and no less than two ministers had to come together to order the Auditor-General to turn the place over with a fine toothcomb - this punctilious act faithfully making the front page of the Feburary 20 edition of The State's Times, complete with phrases such as "serious questions", "problematic areas" and "lack of proper records".

Now, one might expect the incumbents to have figured out that this sort of thing tends to bite them back in short order, given the experience of Yaw and AIM, etc. Indeed, within a day, netizens pointed out that the People's Association had received an "adverse opinion" (i.e. certainly worse than a disclaimer) from 2007-09 at least (as hosted on the PA's own website), before the reports became merely summary briefs.



"Your mouth, so hot/Your web, I'm caught...
but your lips are venomous/Poison"


Stung, the PA had to admit the adverse opinions, and tried to handwave the suddenly-not-serious verdict away as simply due to the grassroots organizations being self-funding, which none of their independent auditors evidently bought into (and which makes one wonder if those GROs take subscriptions or hold regular bake sales or something). Unconvinced, online investigative sources soon noted that the PA had been in accounting no-man's-land since 2001, at the very least.

Given that the PA is being funded to the tune of close to half a billion public dollars a year, one could expect respectable reporters to at least try to pursue the matter, but methinks it will be a cold day in hell before "PA Probed" makes the front page of The State's Times.

Otherwise, the big stories were Our Most Successful Investment Firm trying to push Shin Corp to its subsidiary, even as the situation in Thailand gets pretty murky. As for the Budget, the creation of an S$8 billion Pioneer Generation Fund seemed beyond reproach... only for commentators to question its apparently effortless funding, with some ultra-skeptics taking this as a sign that the incumbents have given up trying to get votes from the younger set. Just can't win, then.



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