Auditor General Larry Dennis has responded to accusations by Bermuda Industrial Union president Derrick Burgess and Works Minister Alex Scott in a full statement that should satisfy any doubters about his performance and his conduct of the Berkeley management audit.

The tragedy is that a public servant of Mr. Dennis' integrity and standing should be forced to wage a verbal war with a Cabinet Minister and the leader of the Island's largest trade union.

His performance over 25 years should speak for itself.

Nonetheless, he has been forced to do this because, rather than deal with the facts as laid out in the report on the Berkeley Institute, both Mr. Burgess and Mr. Scott have instead taken the expedient route of shooting, or smearing the messenger rather than deal with the valid concerns he raised.

That's too bad, because as Government backbencher Dale Butler has said, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the Auditor's report, and it should not have been necessary for him to justify his entire career in defending the report.

Still, the bottom line is that he has done this, providing chapter and verse on when and why other special audits - including one on Westgate Correctional Facility - were conducted and what the results were.

These included a study on the Airport which revealed an overspend of $11 million, and the Westgate report that revealed that a performance bond had not been put up, that Government bailed out the contractor to the tune of $2 million and that the Government chose to collect only $200,000 in liquidated damages for delays at Westgate when it was entitled to collect more than $1 million.

All of that was reported by the Auditor and was then reported on by the media. None of it made the then-Government look good, so the claim by Mr. Scott that Mr. Dennis is doing something unusual in investigating Berkeley is meaningless as is the idea that he is being tougher on the current Government than he was on the previous one.

Indeed, former Works Minister Dr. Clarence Terceira told The Royal Gazette, only half jokingly, that he thought Mr. Dennis was a member of the PLP when the UBP was in power. Mr. Dennis has not changed; the governing party has.

The other person who has not changed is Mr. Scott. Mr. Scott's political modus operandi has always been that attack is the best defence, and when he or his party come under criticism he will always attack the individual making the criticism, not on the facts, but on the person's supposed motivation. His conduct towards Mr. Dennis is no different and it is clear that he has been preparing his attack for some time since he commented on Mr. Dennis' alleged propensity for editorialising before the audit was even released.

As well as attacking the individual, Mr. Scott will also attempt to undermine the individual's credibility and in this he has been joined by Mr. Burgess. Rather than deal with the facts, Mr. Burgess would sooner try to turn Mr. Dennis into some kind of anti-union ogre who believes that black people are incapable of conducting business.

All Mr. Dennis said was that he could not judge whether the union could fund the performance bond because the union had failed to file an annual report as it is required to do so every year since 1999. And yet Mr. Dennis is the "anti-trade unionist" when the union executive cannot - and will not - tell its membership or the general public how much money it has or if the company it set up did in fact pay the surety for the project.

Mr. Burgess has refused to answer those questions, just as the Government refused to state who and how a performance bond had been put up. The latter was one of the many reasons that Mr. Dennis started his audit and he is owed an apology for the unfounded and unjustified criticisms that have been made against him for simply doing his job.