The Great Train Robbery

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What is the biggest con-trick of modern times?

I thought it was interesting to hear about that Hatton Garden Heist - more info here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-32439127 . Funny the different connotations that robbery & heist, as words seem to have. Whereas a robbery is obviously bad and the culprits should be caught and exposed to the full extent of the law, there is something romantic about a 'heist'.

From organisations I encounter, one of the most regular and effective con-trick I encounter is 'audit'. Please understand I am pro-financial control and actually a stickler when I encounter procedures not being followed. I am also keen to document procedures too, where they are absent. So I should be the auditors friend really.

I remember many years ago when I was in retail, at Littlewoods, I was often involved in payroll audit for over 30k employees. The name of the auditor, was Gerry Myers. He was relentless, dare I say it an efficient auditor. He was at least 30 years older than me too, I would say, generally dressed in shades of brown too.

Modern 'auditors' I often encounter, (now I won't name names obviously), much like policemen (and policewomen), seem to be getting younger. Sixth-form younger in some cases. They seem to ask the same questions every quarter too. Not surprising that they rarely unearth any significant answers.

Rather than understanding the systems they audit, they often ask for special reports to extract data from various places, in order to make their job easier. Now if you had something to hide, wouldn't that be just the report, to get it filtered out of, or buried in?  I would, although I have got to say I am always the model of honesty. Where reports can be requested like that, they inevitably cost money and may even incur some annual maintenance. In my world, auditors should be paying for that, as its for their convenience, not the organisations they audit.

I remember the role of auditors at Cosmopolitan Housing, which received a clean bill of health, (causing sector instability, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24041434) . Auditors need to be experienced enough to find the problems, and provide possible solutions too.  Cutting costs and corners benefits no-one and educes, not adds value. Ensure your organisation is getting value for money from your audit reports. Organisations need insight, not basic box ticking, for good governance.

Related Post: Are you on top of your Repair KPIs?

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.


Black Uhuru - The Great Train Robbery.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here
Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.
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Block Chain Rockin' Beats

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You like me must have been reading lots about the Internet Of Things (IOT), particularly how it's expected to work within socialhousing. I have chatted to people and read about sensors for care and support, that detect if our service users have left their bed, brushed their teeth, or switched the kettle on for a morning brew. Also of smart boilers, that can contact its owner, via a contractor and log a repair, to correct its fault that is just becoming evident. The logical step for an autonomous boiler, is to go beyond calling for help, actually order it, with BitCoin too.

I already have a gas and electric meter read by the dustcart every fortnight, when it does the bins down my road.  See, I am a pioneer myself! As we know though, from the old cowboy films, pioneers are generally those with the arrows in their backs. Better in some cases, to maybe ride in later, with the women and children, in the covert wagons.

It all sounds like good stuff eh? What could go wrong?

Well it would be enormously funny if a hacker spoofed every new boiler on the scheme and logged multiple works orders for each. You know just for fun? Or maybe, more a scenario that auditors might think of. What if one of your Contractors got a young hacker in to just spoof a few randomly, at regular intervals, to log a repair?

As for my meters, when I was a young pup at school, a mate of mines father, good catholic of course, discovered a way to reduce his gas bill. For a few weeks each month, he switched it around, running it backwards. This worked fine until one quarter he over did it. The gas board (way before we were asked to 'Tell Sid' and privatise it off to be British Gas), were puzzled as he seemed to be supplying gas to the national grid. What if I could spoof my meters?

Clearly it would not be in my interests to risk anything like that, but how can be safeguard, secure all these IOT sensors, to prove they are what they seem?

Bitcoin uses the BlockChain concept, in order to authenticate transactions, in order to set up a 'trust' relationship. Blockchain technology is an ideal way to track IOT devices and their individual histories. Much like in Bitcoin, a 'ledger' of IOT transactions can be created, so peer devices can be sure of what they are talking to, and its history. With the reliability of a Blockchain history, maybe even an auditor will allow that boiler to place its own repair and combined with a digital currency, such as Bitcoin, pay for the works order itself.

This would provide a secure means of digital data sharing, with a scalable and robust form of coordination, between devices.   It's a fascinating subject and clearly we are at the beginning of a device revolution here. Read more on the Blockchain technology stack below.

http://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-application-stack/
Related Post: What happens when Channel Shift may slim down your service centre? 

     Catch the blog monthly archive at https://archive.org/details/@housingitguy

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.


The Chemical Brothers - Block Rockin' Beats.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.
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Thieves Like Us

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

In lots of the system and process Critical Friend work I regularly get involved with, I see plenty of wide open goals, which could easily enable internal fraud.

Early on, here in this blog, I must declare my honesty, you can of course trust a boyhood good Catholic and altar boy. I can assure you that I have never had to confess to breaking the eight commandment.

However, a father of one of my primary school friends (a senior in the St Vincent De Paul Society too), was hauled off for a six month stretch at HM's Pleasure, for swapping his gas meter connections around a few weeks each quarter. He was only caught when British Gas found one quarter he (accidently) supplied more gas to them than he had from them (apparently). As with all criminal dodges, it was sussed in the end when mistakes were made and they asked for three years of similar crimes to be also taken into account too.

Who knew that swapping your gas meter pipes around, would run an analogue meter backwards? Maybe that’s why suppliers are almost falling over themselves, to tempt us over to Smart Meters?

I don’t think I have a particularly criminal mind, but in one of my early jobs in retail ICT at Littlewoods Liverpool, I did a lot of work with the internal auditor, particularly with the payroll packages. We did have a payroll of over 32,000 staff, so it was an area that got attention pretty much every other month. His name (strangely) was Gerry Myers. I learn't a lot through the questions he asked, bespoke reports he wanted etc, It was a real insight into how a criminal mind might work, or a detective. He kind of had the charisma of Columbo, without the cigar, (just when you think you have seen the back of him, he would ask, “Just one more thing….”).

System and project reviews for me often identify numerous security holes that I recognise, like those in a 16 month matured Swiss cheese. For example, obsessive system control of responsive repairs budget is common. If a kitchen repair SOR cost escalates from £85 to £365, the repairs team experience a grilling like the Spanish Inquisition. There is generally a tight audit trail of authorisation for a DLO or key partnering contractor. It's very rare these are not tightly linked to the finance purchase ledger too. Trying to embezzle here, is as crazy as trying to gemmy open an ATM cash machine.

However, where external contractors are used with manual replication of documents in the finance purchase ledger, or fed from a hefty (multi-million pound) capital/cyclical budget, there is often rich pickings, even if just a few % can be creamed off, there’s a few hundred grand per annum for the taking. Unbelievably easily stolen in plain sight.

One project I was involved in for a large Midlands based landlord, involved automating asbestos surveys and any follow-on work, updating Asset register and leaving a good audit trail. While we had rolled this out for reactive and voids work, the planned/capital/cyclical team, said, “we can't work like that”. The reason was that team were not actually in control of ordering asbestos surveys. They just added a PO to the value of the monthly invoices when they came in. The budget was over £600k for asbestos annually. I explained how between three of us, we could pocket 3 x £20k each annually, by just starting a convenient arrangement to raise £60k of bogus orders, which would always just be paid. For all I knew it might already have been happened by accident now and again!

Its tempting to put specialist compliance/cyclical contractors totally in charge of doing the work, with few checks & audit etc. Gas service & LGSR is a very common situation for this. Where there are few controls, poor/missing integration to finance, apart from the staff cost of waste due to double-handling, it’s an open goal to the unscrupulous.

There have been plenty of cases that have come to court, the latest being one at Greenwich Council, where last month two Council workers were jailed, over a £1.5m false repair contracts fraud. A nice little earner for using the technique I have outlined above, this time by arranging bogus lift works and servicing. Nice little earner, read more on it here.

This is one of many. 

When I was at one of the HMS system suppliers in a past life, there was a case in 2005 where a two handed social housing DLO con of over £330k was perpetrated over just 7 months. Read about that one here -  There were plenty of integration, checks and balances in the supplied solution, however few were implemented and audited, by the landlord. You can bet they certainly were put in, after that court case.

Internally audit must remain vigilant, it should not and cannot be just a tick-box exercise. Trust your audits or system reviews, think like a thief and be sure to prioritise plugging any gaps found. While improving organisation security, internal efficiency will also be improved, opening the door to effective transformation.

Subscribe to our blog here on this link, to always catch the latest news on whats happening in the sector.

Acutance Consulting would be happy to help you review systems options, 

please just get in touch, for a chat over a brew ☕😋

       Related Post: How can landlords manage repair complaints better for everyone 

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

New Order - Thieves Like Us.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.

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(I Won’t) Pay Your Price

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

The cost of living is high enough without Christmas coming along and running a steamroller across our current accounts and maxing out our credit cards. 

Things these days are not cheap and in some ways while some things have got cheaper (such as disk space while we consume more and more data) and some much more expensive (like software we now often license at full price rent monthly or annually).

I come across lots of missing functionality that is quite often an obstacle to really good self-service, making integrated solutions work seamlessly or eliminating those spreadsheet archipelagos. On the latter, now at the end of 2023 I see more places like the Malay Archipelago than the Falkland Islands. As anyone who has worked with me or knows me, I work with a vast variety of socialhousing landlords and councils of all sizes and types. My smallest client was a charity that managed only 34 homes, largest over 150k properties. So we may be generally solving the same challenges, but we also have our unique features.

My professional reaction is to question those gaps, as there are usually easy solutions in an infrastructure, software or application sense. When you breakdown the reasons, for me it generally falls into the following reasons:

1 – My clients are not aware of some of the suitable solutions available

2 – Some of that functionality was de-scoped during implementation

3 – Some of that functionality was meant to follow in a future phase, that never happened

4 – There is not currently a productised solution to plug that gap

5 – There is one or more solutions, but they all sounded too expensive

While I see a lot of 1-3, not many of 4, however I see way too much of 5 (which is very interesting).

Are software providers or HMS makers too greedy? If I had £50 over the last decade, for every time I heard that, I would easily have over a grand by now. Is that a reasonable accusation ? It can feel from certain suppliers naming no names, the minimum you will be quoted can expected to be £10k. That’s whether you are asking for something blue sky or maybe really should be working properly already!

Having been on ‘the dark side’ myself many years ago, its got to be said suppliers do need to turn a dollar, although there is perhaps reasonable and unreasonable profit being made, considering a lot of work takes place much cheaply offshore these days. However, most of the time its less of the suppliers profiteering and more perception of clients. Often exclaiming like those folk in Yorkshire do on their counties celebratory day, ‘Ow Much?’.

“Well it was expensive”, how expensive, “well £30k”

Those conversations remind me of that saying, “They know the price of everything and the value of nothing”. The point of spending any money or making an investment in business, is to realise greater value or efficiency. When I work with commercial organisations, such as external contractors, that calculation is often done at the speed of light in someone’s head. In social housing or councils, often a calculation is never done at all. A business case can just be an obstacle to be maneuvered, rather than a tool to help make a decision to see if a £30k investment is worthwhile.

Sometimes it truly is a no-brainer.

£30k not spent on a finance interface to link repair invoices with a purchase ledger for example, might mean we have to employ a full time equivalent person to double enter them. With pension, salary, employers NI, holidays and sickness payments etc, that might be more than a £30k cost annually. In addition, risks of mis-keying, mistakes, risk of susceptibility to fraud, auditor concerns also point to this being a more than sensible investment.

We are now close to a new year coming and the opportunity of renewal and turning over a new leaf. Maybe dust off your rejected historic aborted improvements and try to see them through the prism of some hindsight and the un-totalled costs of not following through. You never know, even your supplier might just have a short January Sale on soon. Here’s hoping!

Acutance Consulting would be happy to help you turbo-charge current solutions, 

please just get in touch, for a chat over a few gingers & a brew ☕😋

       Related Post: Consultants - Can they save you more than they cost you?

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

Motörhead – (I Won’t) Pay Your Price.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.

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