"I have been told incompetence is not criminal. Negligence is, however. A responsibility of public officers, commensurate with their positions, is to protect public assets."

So said former Auditor General Larry Dennis in his final Auditor General's report, which was tabled in the House of Assembly on Friday.

Those words might well sum up Mr. Dennis' whole final report, and indeed his lengthy and sometimes controversial tenure as Auditor General.

Finance Minister Paula Cox noted in her response to the report that Mr. Dennis had acknowledged that financial reporting has improved vastly in the last decade. That is so, and it raises the important point again that for all the vitriol and animus directed towards Mr. Dennis by some of her Cabinet colleagues over the years, Mr. Dennis was as hard on the United Bermuda Party when it was in power as he was on the PLP in the last decade.

And it also shows that for all the criticism that Mr. Dennis did level on the Government, he was ready to acknowledge improvements, as indeed he did.

But the improvements in reporting systems and financial controls mean nothing if public servants, both political and in the Civil Service, fail to implement them, and it is here that the examples of the National Drug Commission and the Faith Based Tourism Initiative highlighted by Mr. Dennis are so critical.

In the case of the NDC, there appears to have been a total refusal by the authorities running the organisation to administer controls or to work with the Auditor General to ensure that proper financial controls were in place.

As a result, as much as $20 million appears to have been spent with almost no accountability, and officials within the organisation quite literally treated public money as their own, spending it on family vacations and on personal purchases, including Victoria's Secret, of all places.

Mr. Dennis said he could not be certain if this was due to incompetence or a purposeful attempt to conceal wrongdoing, but it beggars belief that public servants would use public money for personal purchases without some awareness that this was wrong. Mr. Dennis has called for a Police investigation and one should take place immediately if it has not already started.

Mr. Dennis has also called for a Police investigation into FBT, and this, according to Ms Cox, is already underway. It would be wrong in the circumstances to delve too far into the details of the financial transactions there.

But what should be of grave concern is Mr. Dennis' description of the administration of this initiative by the Ministry of Tourism and Transport, and the sometimes contradictory answers given to his office concerning the tendering and oversight of the initiative.

Mr. Dennis reported that at one stage Tourism said it didn't need to be tendered because Mr. Curtis had done so well organising faith-based events in 2006; yet later said the reason for not tendering was that it was a "sponsored event". You can't have it both ways. Offering differing explanations for failures to follow stated Government policies begins to sound simply like an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.

Similarly, the contract awarded to the organiser of the initiative stated that he should not be paid for events until they had been held and he had been able to show how many tourists had attended them. But he was paid in advance and apparently never submitted the paperwork required.

Mr. Dennis says a complaint should be made by the Head of the Civil Service against those civil servants responsible for these failures. He is right.