"I can't spend all my time looking at this standards issue and doing the job at the council, so I thought the best thing to do was to temporarily stand down for two to three weeks to deal with this matter and then get back to running what is regarded by the Audit Commission as one of the best-run councils in the country".

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Ultimately, the committee concluded, the role of commissioning auditors would be best left to a centrally run organisation, much like the rump Audit Commission.

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Although fraud prevention mechanisms, such as the Ethics Helpline and Office of the Ombudsman, led Corporate Security and Internal Audit groups to investigate reports about certain arrestees, they did not appear to run joint investigations or develop a corrective actions approach.

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Earlier this month the National Audit Office (NAO) found decommissioning projects were over budget and that storage buildings were "run-down".

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Though he faces no public allegation of personal wrongdoing, Mr Yushchenko's first denials that any unorthodox methods had been used, followed by a claim that underlings had run the scheme without his knowledge and then by repeated delays in publishing a detailed audit of the bank's dealings in the period concerned, have all damaged his standing.

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