We’ve gathered all of the money spent by Isle of Wight council on credit cards over three years starting in 2008 and is publishing the full details today.
The sums spent on the cards by council officers and councillors are huge – over £2 million pounds in less than three years.
It’s a project that we’ve been working on with WightGeek for quite a while and with the Public Accounts Committee releasing their report today into ‘Government Procurement Card’ (credit card equivalents) and media reports of their ‘abuse’ circulating, we thought it was an ideal occasion to reveal all of the Isle of Wight data in a new version of Armchair Auditor to you today.
Have a delve through the data
As you might expect, we’ve got a number of stories coming up highlighting parts of the expenditure of the close-to 35,000 card transactions – an average of about 50 transactions on every one of those working days over those three years.
It’s worth pointing out that many, if not all of these payment might have a perfectly reasonable explanation, but the data that the council chose to provided to us only shows what you can see on Armchair Auditor, missing the details that it’s highly likely are held in their SAP accounting system.
Commenting is easy
In the meantime, please go on to the site and look over the data. You are able to put your own comments on each of the Merchants and transactions, so if you find anything that you think unusual, please share it with the rest of the Island.
Comments are welcome, as always.
Credit card spending on Armchair Auditor On The Wight
Update 09:05 2nd June: Added para explaining the council didn’t provide details of what purchases were for and our ‘spending might be legitimate’ approach when looking at the data, after ‘Concerned of IW’ prompted.
