S-Files

Cutting Cloth Properly

The ContraCelsum S-Award Committee has voted to bestow an S-Award on Sean Hughes.

Mr Hughes is our kinda guy.  The government recently created a new bureaucratic organ--the Financial Markets Authority ("FMA").  The intent and objective of the FMA is to keep all players in our financial markets on the straight and narrow.  Now this we regard as a legitimate role of government--lawful, if you will.  Detecting and punishing fraud, deception, dissembling and dishonesty with respect to the property of others is what God has instituted civil government for.

The FMA has taken over personnel and functions inherited from the Securities Commission.  But Mr Hughes has determined that certain staff perquisites which were part of the way the Securities Commission did things will not be part of the inheritance.  This from the NZ Herald: 

Financial Markets Authority (FMA) chief executive Sean Hughes has taken a big knife to the former Securities Commission's staff perks, which included massages and Christmas gift packs, saying he had become concerned about how the new financial markets watchdog's expenditure on such items would look in public.

Included on his perk-busting hit list were staff farewells and family-related gift tokens. The total cost of these perks and others came to $60,000 - the equivalent of one salary - a year, he said.  "Recently, I mentioned that I am carefully considering a range of discretionary staff benefits which were previously supplied by the Securities Commission, predominantly to its Wellington-based staff," he said in an email leaked to the media. "I am concerned that our expenditure of public funds on a number of these items may not stand up to public scrutiny as was the fact that they are not universally available to all staff," he said. "It's also debatable whether many of these items ought to be provided by an employer," he said.

Hughes said he had cancelled the SkyTV subscription in the former chairman - Jane Diplock's - executive lounge and had put a stop to the tradition of putting on a catered lunch for some staff members each month. "I don't believe I can justify FMA providing a monthly catered lunch for only some staff when they are arguably doing no more than what is their usual job," he said.  "Taxpayers' funds have to be used extremely carefully and cautiously," he said. "When you're talking about the equivalent of a full time salary, then you have to ask yourself, 'should we be doing this?"
(Emphasis, ours.)

We suspect that this sort of largesse is layered right through the vast Wellington bureaucracy.  No doubt senior staff at the Securities Commission believe they were entitled to have the long-suffering taxpayer fund the lifestyle to which they had quickly became accustomed.   They were and are wrong.  Mr Hughes has it right.

The Committee is pleased to bestow the S-Award, Class I upon Sean Hughes, for enlightened management and for treating public money with exemplary respect.  These are actions we regard as Sound, Salutary, and Sober.