{"id":33615,"date":"2016-06-06T10:04:39","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T09:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=33615"},"modified":"2016-06-06T18:25:06","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T17:25:06","slug":"wood-trees-and-accounting-gibberish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2016\/06\/06\/wood-trees-and-accounting-gibberish\/","title":{"rendered":"Accounting gibberish from the National Audit Office"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got an email late last week from the National Audit Office inviting me to explore the latest Whole of Government Accounts. Given that I may be one the handful of people in the UK who does read these accounts I marked the mail for attention later and just took a look. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nao.org.uk\/highlights\/whole-of-government-accounts\/\" target=\"_blank\">I was presented with this graphic<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2016\/06\/06\/wood-trees-and-accounting-gibberish\/screen-shot-2016-06-06-at-09-57-58\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-33616\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-33616\" src=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Screen-Shot-2016-06-06-at-09.57.58-550x533.png\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2016-06-06 at 09.57.58\" width=\"550\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Screen-Shot-2016-06-06-at-09.57.58-550x533.png 550w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Screen-Shot-2016-06-06-at-09.57.58-309x300.png 309w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Screen-Shot-2016-06-06-at-09.57.58-232x225.png 232w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Screen-Shot-2016-06-06-at-09.57.58-136x132.png 136w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Screen-Shot-2016-06-06-at-09.57.58.png 1962w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Very politely, this is akin to gibberish.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the NAO was trying to communicate they have clearly failed to do so.<\/p>\n<p>We deserve vastly better public accounting than this.<\/p>\n<p>No wonder the public are confused.<\/p>\n<p>I would classify it as a 'fail'. And a pretty spectacular one at that.<\/p>\n<p><em>NB 6pm 6 June: I have had a response from the NAO on this blog. I am waiting for their permission to publish it<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got an email late last week from the National Audit Office inviting me to explore the latest Whole of Government Accounts. Given that I<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2016\/06\/06\/wood-trees-and-accounting-gibberish\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accounting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}