I regret that on the day Senator Sir John Keane moved this motion I had to meet a deputation and I was obliged to leave the House before Senator Keane had finished. During most of his speech he dealt with matters that were not exactly covered by his motion. There were general criticisms of the finance accounts. I may say I am not in any very great agreement with the point of view Sir John Keane holds. Unfortunately for me, he showed me a copy of a book he wrote, and having read that book, I do not think he has a very good view on these matters. The book was not in the nature of a reasoned exposition of a point of view but was merely a diatribe against Treasury officials, and however intelligible a diatribe may be it does not carry us much further. The statements he made here, however moderately he spoke, were in the nature of a diatribe. He talks about public accounts as being confusing and misleading. We have adopted a system of presentation of public accounts from the British system that has sufficed on the whole. I do not say they are not susceptible of improvement. I do not say the accounts we publish are as clear in every instance as they can be or ought to be. We have aimed even already at introducing improvements. We have introduced certain changes which make matters clearer. It cannot be expected that you can put public accounts into such a form that people who will not give a moment's attention to them, still less people who, like Sir John Keane, are determined not to understand them, shall understand them. If a person is determined not to understand something he will not succeed in understanding it, and public accounts must be in such a form that some little attention must be given to them before they can be understood. A person could not be expected to understand the balance sheet of a firm if he did not trouble to know what profit and loss and other elementary things are. Still less can a person who has not learned what is aimed at in public accounts be expected to gather it from them.
Dealing with the question of an expert committee there is a great pressure of work on the officials who deal with public accountancy and finance. We have set up a new State. Great changes have been made in administration and legislation. Problems dealing with the apportionment of funds between Great Britain and the Free State, or Northern Ireland and the Free State, occupy time. In the Army we had a new service. We had great difficulties owing to the state of disturbance in the country. That has thrown a great pressure of work on the officials responsible for those matters. It has been more important for us to do the day-to-day work, and keep some sort of order and ordinary control, than, just at the very start, to set out and adopt some new system which is a great improvement on that which has prevailed in Great Britain. I said on a former occasion that as soon as it was possible I intended to set up a Committee which will represent the officials dealing with public accounts from the point of view of audit and from the point of view of the Treasury, together with some outside accountant to see what improvements could be effected. It has not been found possible so far to do that, and I just wish to say that in my view the matter is not one of urgency. The urgent thing for the moment is to use as well as it can be used the system that exists.
I do not know if it is worth while going back in detail on the observations that Senator Sir John Keane offered. He said that the delay in the presentation of the finance accounts was due to nothing but laxity on the part of the finance branch. He referred to the fact that the statutory date was the 30th June; that they were delayed beyond that date, and that there was nothing to be done but put down the totals and publish them. There are more than totals given in a finance account. It is necessary to give the correct and accurate figures. Something within one or two per cent. of the exact figures will not do. In Great Britain the figures are never presented on the statutory date. They have all sorts of conventions there which we have not, being a free state. What they do is to lay the cover of the accounts on the Table on the statutory date, but the actual accounts are not presented for months afterwards. If Senator Sir John Keane will look at the latest British finance accounts he will find that some of the individual accounts are dated July 13, showing that they were not even sent to the printers until a fortnight after they were laid on the Table of the House of Commons in dummy form.
There was great difficulty in getting the exact figures, recovering repayments and other matters within the time they were done. I think it is not discreditable at all that we are able to present them in approximately the time within which they can be presented in Great Britain. Instead of uttering these criticisms without really any study and thought, if the Senator had just looked over the British finance accounts he would have seen that there was cause for the delay, and that it was not a mere matter of setting down the totals in possession of the Finance Department.
He deals with the Post Office receipts and complains that on one side we have two and a half millions, and on the other side two millions, and that it would be much clearer if we only put down what the assets would be and the nett deficit of the Post Office. If we put down a half a million on one side the Senator would ask how we arrived at that. The statements are statements of receipts and expenditure, and it is necessary to put down the two sides, and to show the receipts and expenditure. Statute enacts that you put down the details. If we did the sum in subtraction we would not have got the nett deficit on the Post Office. These accounts do not pretend to be commercial accounts. Provision is being made for the submission, in addition to the finance accounts, of commercial accounts of the Post Office. That brings in factors that cannot be brought in when you are merely submitting accounts of receipts and expenditure. I do not know exactly when we will be able to publish the first commercial accounts of the Post Office. The matter of determining a capital sum to begin such accounts has been in preparation for a considerable time.
Senator Sir John Keane deals, I think, with account No. 23, in which he seems to indicate that there was expenditure after the end of the year, and that it was taken out of the grant for that particular year. Expenditure made in any particular year must be charged to that particular year. The £11,740 to which attention was drawn represents an adjustment between various grants. That means that in a particular year money was paid out of a certain vote or grant. It was discovered later that there should be a readjustment and that the expenditure should be out of some other grant. There is an issue consequently at the end of the financial year in respect of the grant out of which it should have been paid. That figure merely represents an adjustment and is regular. I wish to say that everything that has been done by us was done in accordance with the custom of the financial system we took over, and that nothing irregular or unprecedented was done. I think that is the only point raised that causes any difficulty in connection with the finance accounts, and anyone who has paid a little attention to these accounts could easily have unravelled it. Obviously the amount is a very small one.
The Senator referred in connection with some account to the use of the words "written off." He said the word, generally, was "surrendered." Again, if the Senator had looked at the British finance accounts he would have seen that the words "written off" are used. The Senator seemed to indicate that we were doing something wrong and irregular, but he does not seem to take the least trouble to see what was done. Surrender would be the appropriate word if you were dealing with actual cash advances, but when dealing with credit the words to be used are "written off."
The Senator referred to Account 27, which, he says, purports to give assets and liabilities of the State. This Account again I have to repeat is a finance account, and it would be misleading to introduce an element such as the value of post office buildings, or government buildings, into it. You cannot look at the State simply as a commercial firm carrying on. All the assets in the country are State assets. If it comes to the necessity of falling back on our reserves, Senator Sir John Keane's property and his house would be the property of the State as much as the post office. To attempt to pretend that the accounts of the State can be made up the same as a commercial house would be really not to make things clearer but to make them entirely misleading.
There is no reason why some of the particular assets upon which the State has a more immediate claim should be brought in if we are not going to bring in all the assets to which in case of necessity it might have a claim. These are finance accounts, dealing with cash and debit and with purely finance transactions and considerations. They do not pretend to be any more. So far these are matters which were scarcely covered by the motion which Senator Sir John Keane moved. Dealing with the question of a different system of appropriation accounts and the question of accounting by units, I have already said that we have had great difficulty in doing all that we have done in the matter of public accounting, and in keeping matters right financially. We have not been able to give attention to improvements of the system, but we are prepared to do that when we find it possible to devote attention to it. I would say, however, that, so far, the information seems to be, that it is only to such things as the Army that this system of accountancy, which Senator Sir John Kean advocates, can best be applied. It has been adopted in the case of the British Army, but it can be seen immediately that there is a great difference between a big army like that of the British, and a small army such as our own, an army not so much larger than the strength of the old R.I.C. We give as much detail in regard to our army as was given in regard to the R.I.C. It is doubtful whether a system that is worth the cost in the case of a big institution like the British Army would be worth the cost here. To my mind it certainly would not be worth the cost.
As regards the other Departments, there are not comparable units in every Department, and the system could not very well be applied to them. One sees that it could be applied in the case of the Army, but that it would cost something, and the question is whether the benefits to be derived from applying it to the Army would be commensurate with the cost of it. Perhaps if we had adopted a different Army system, if we had got to the stage when we might have some sort of a national defence force on a militia basis and that we had big numbers of men employed, with substantial units which could be compared, there might be advantage in having such a system. In any case the cost of our Army was less than £4,000,000 last year, and it is going to be considerably less in the coming year. I may say, too, that we are not at the end of reductions in the cost of the Army. Changes are still going on in it. However, that is not a matter with which I wish to deal very much. I have an open mind on the matter and I am prepared to introduce changes when we can have the matter satisfactorily examined. I would not have troubled to reply in opposition if Senator Sir John Keane had confined himself to an advocacy of the change. I might think that the change was desirable or I might think that it was undesirable, but in any case I would certainly say that I was prepared to have it examined, although I was not convinced that it was a matter of such urgency that other business of a more urgent nature should be thrown aside. The Senator, however, utters all sorts of criticisms against the Department of Finance and against the officials of that Department, but he has not taken the least trouble to show whether his comparisons will bear examination or not. He throws off all sorts of innuendoes that things are not being done right, but there is no basis for these innuendoes. At the present stage, if the Senator wants to criticise —it is within his duty to criticise—he should at least take the trouble of making some study of the accounts that he is criticising, and not give the impression or attempt to give the impression or take the risk of giving the impression that things are being done wrongly and that we are not living up to standard, but that we are going outside the principles that have been laid down and acted upon in the past. I do say that his speech, whether he intended it or not, was an unfair speech.
