The Frankston Council $460,000 Fraud

 The $460,000 Fraud

Fraud Prevention is better than cure

This article is from the Age in July 2020.  When it was published it was recent in terms of council events. But did you know that in the Council Elections that year not a single candidate spoke about fraud as an issue. A former Frankston council manager admited to $460,000 fraud and nobody said anything.  Wasn't it an issue? Fraud prevention is much better than cure.

What do we know?

• The Fraud accured over a period of 9 months from Sept 2016 to May 2017
• A software glitch allowed this to occur.
• The Fraud was undiscovered until Frankston City Council audited its purchasing history.
• It was then reported to the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission
• The Manager was charged in January and Pleaded guilty in July 2020
• Another offender still hasn't been to Court

Frankston City Council Offices - $460,000 Fraud

So it has taken 3 years to discover and take action on this fraud and the actions are not yet complete.

The AGE article said it went on for seven months, but left out the event in May 2017 which makes it nine months over all.  Isn't it an issue that it went on undetected for nine months?  And then there was a significant period of time before the audit, and until that was completed Council had no idea anything was wrong. Even after the audit did they know that there had been a fraud, or did they just realise something was wrong? In the last twenty years how often has a fraud like this happened? Do we even know if their have been frauds in the past? What checks and assurances do we have that this won't happen again? Even if they have fixed this software glitch, what assurances do we have there is not another glitch? If it does happen again how will council detect it is happening?  There are lots of questions but not many answers. Is anybody trying to find an answer? Why is it that not a single candidate is talking about this as an issue? 

Again, which candidates were in office when this happened? It's not hard to figure out, but I will leave that for you.