"Mr Thomson says he has expected to be fired ever since he offered to give Mr Ryall a private briefing on the fraud. "He turned that into a three-ring political circus that he was intent on removing me from my position, and so certainly none of this has come as a surprise."
Mr Thomson says the fraud was set up well before he took on the position and the board acted on the first piece of information available.Thomson then goes on to make a very good point about the message Mr. Ryall's action is sending to senior executives in public organisations:
"My real concern here is that the message is that if you are unfortunate enough to inherit something illegal going on, and you subsequently discover that, then you'd be better to sweep it under the carpet - because otherwise you'll be held as guilty as the criminals."The Stuff report quotes Thomson as saying Ryall sacked him because Thomson is a member of the Labour Party:
"He thought he could get rid of someone who batted for the other side and make some political capital out of it," he told NZPA.This sounds more like the Tony Ryall I've been watching for almost 20 years. In my humble opinion, he's been on the wrong side of many issues and appears to be able to remain there comfortably by taking little heed of any evidence he may be wrong about anything. Ryall's a True Believer.
Does Mr. Ryall really intend to provide incentive for senior public servants to hide such things as this fraud lest their own careers be destroyed by the malfeasance of others? Based on his record to date, I'm sure he didn't give it a moment's thought, so keen was he, as Thomson says, to score political points. That's the Tony Ryall I've come to know since first hearing of him in 1990.
Having said that, if he is aware of any evidence that proves Thomson did anything more than discover and report a fraud (as he rightly should have done), I'd like to know what it is. Yes, $17M is a lot of money, but we are talking about a DHB's IT budget over most of a decade. The Otago DHB as a whole has annual revenues approaching NZ$500 million. I've worked in IT for over 20 years. In an IT context, $17M across many years in an organisaion spending $5 billion in a decade is small beer and would not hard to conceal if it had the right words and paper wrapped around it by the executives. In this case, they were contracting out services and paying invoices....though little or no actual services were being provided.
Good on Thomson and the Board for doing the right thing and blowing the whistle immediately they knew. Shame it wasn't discovered sooner. Boo Hiss to Ryall for punishing a senior exec for coming clean and doing the right thing as soon as he was aware of the crime. Clearly, the precedent is set: Mr Ryall should resign as Minister if further such frauds are discovered on his watch. He should have known, right?
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