STAFFORDSHIRE County Council is still awaiting notification of a “DOGE audit”, two months after the authority came under the control of Reform UK.
The party’s national leader Nigel Farage spoke about plans to send a team of software engineers, data analysts and forensic auditors to comb through the authority’s finances in order to identify savings when he visited last month.
The audit group has become known as DOGE in the wake of the Department of Government Efficiency set up in the US under the second Trump administration. It was brought in at Kent County Council – another authority now led by Reform UK – last month.
But on Tuesday (8th July), Cllr Simon Tagg, a former cabinet member under the previous Conservative administration, questioned how the work would fit in with the authority’s own corporate governance rules during an Audit and Standards Committee meeting.
Committee members were being asked to approve the updated Code of Corporate Governance at the time.
Cllr Tagg said:
“Good corporate governance is key to any organisation’s success and we have done very well with it for many years. I think many people are aware that there’s going to be an external audit of our finances – the DOGE effect – which is going to be descending on Staffordshire.
“How does that fit within our corporate governance rules? How are we going to safeguard corporate governance through that process? And shouldn’t this committee be the one that signs off the controls around a political party coming in from the outside and auditing council finances?”
The council’s monitoring officer Kate Loader responded:
“At this time we have received no formal request or notification of the DOGE audit.
“Until we receive that formal notification, setting out the terms of reference and details of that, we won’t be able to respond to the query in full.”
Speaking last month, council leader Cllr Ian Cooper said the authority was preparing for the arrival of the DOGE team – and gave assurances that its work would align with council rules.
He added:
“I’ve already had conversations with our chief executive and also the county solicitor, because obviously we want to do it properly. We don’t just want to come in like a bull in the china shop.
“We want to have a conversation with the council, and chief executive Pat Flaherty has been very receptive to that. So we’re drawing up a set of protocols to make sure everyone is happy with that.
“At some point in time, the DOGE team will interface with the council and ask for the required information. It’s not looking for individual people.
“We’re looking at departments – what works and what doesn’t work, the granular detail. Without that detail it’s hard to make good business decisions.
“I think a lot of savings will be found. We’ll be coming at it from a different perspective.
“A lot of our people are from a business background, so they’ll take a fresh look at it. We’re not here to frighten people, we’re not here to make people redundant or anything like that.
“We’re just here to ask how we make better use of the funds available.”
