No place for trust

In an ideal world, self regulation and self investigation might be appropriate. The reality, slowly dawning across the planet, those to who we entrust authority are simply not good enough to deserve our trust.
We are seeing government at all levels, and those corporations with the power to affect peoples lives, cannot be taken on good faith alone.
The awareness of the need for independent auditing and oversight for these authorities is growing rapidly. At the same time politicians and executives, jealous of protecting their perks and keen to cover mistakes, fight the concept.
We have, particularly since the 1980s, been going through a cycle of greed and excess. Yes, corruption has been with us since the earliest organised societies, but this recent cycle of greed goes against everything modern society teaches us.
Clearly those with authority are not to be trusted. The proof of that is in the pudding. When caught out malefactors will put aside any pretence of innocence, instead depending on crafty legalisms to protect them.
These same people would then, quite solemnly, have us believe they are capable of operating honestly under their own supervision.
Two recent cases, small on the scale of things, highlight the needs and directions we are facing in developing functional governance.
In Florida, suspended Davie Town Administrator Chris Kovanes, council members want to bring in a consultant to help fix their bidding process.Kovanes, 34, who earned $148,000 a year, was suspended Oct. 18, after being accused of embezzling at least $360,000 from town coffers. Investigators think he has fled Broward County.
Mayor, Tom Truex took the predictable stand in his comments:

"Obviously we have some holes, and we have to fix some problems…"

Stanley Foodman, a forensic accountant and former FDLE fraud investigator, took a different stand, one we are hearing more often from this new breed of public accountants. He asserts that Davie might need a full-time internal auditor or general inspector, saying: "The government has an obligation to do a better job protecting its citizens' tax revenues,"
North to British Columbia and we have a provincial government which has steamrolled controversy by the sheer power of numbers, they totally dominated the legislature. Until recently that is, and now we have a government trying to figure out how to effectively deal with administration scandals.
There it has come to light that under the Campbell administration the deaths of 713 children were not properly reviewed after the provincial government shut down the Children's Commission in 2002.
Campbell’s Liberal government closed down the Children's Commission as part of a cost-cutting program implemented shortly after taking office in 2002.
Under a process intended to eliminate duplication, the government transferred responsibility for the review of child deaths to the coroner's office but did not transfer its funding.
Campbell had admitted. This week, that there was a "systemic breakdown" in the government plan to have the coroner's office take over the files on children's death reviews.
When asked whose decision it was to shelve the investigations, the premier says that while it wasn't his decision, ultimately he is responsible.
The point is Campbell’s government, until elections earlier this year, operated in a vacuum, free from oversight and proper audit. Now, with a strengthened opposition many of the excesses of that period are bound to surface.
While the government is insisting that it will carry out its own review, and the opposition are baying for blood, are the people really any better off? Without independent oversight, it is becoming increasingly clear that we cannot expect to have efficient governance. Without it we will continue to have poor delivery of services and scandal stacked on top of scandal.