Bermuda is to be reported to the United Nations for the sudden and haphazard Government-ordered move that temporarily crippled the Auditor General?s office.

More than a week after the event one of the most important independent branches of Government remains barely functioning and professional office staff have been reduced to sorting through packing boxes and disassembled office furniture.

Having been switched one floor to an unprepared space 1,500 sq ft smaller than its previous office at Victoria Hall, in Victoria Street, the job of straightening out the aftermath is expected to take many weeks.

Auditor General Larry Dennis was off Island when the Ministry of Works and Engineering made its 11th hour decision to carry out the move. Yesterday he viewed the chaos before saying he would send a report to be passed to the United Nations.

The net result is likely to create an embarrassing moment for Bermuda with regards to its mature democracy status.

?Bermuda has to decide where it is going with the concept of the Auditor General. A good indication of a democratic society is how it treats the Auditor General,? said Mr. Dennis.

?I think Bermuda has stepped backwards.?

Telephone and computer connections remain well below requirements and a large computer server still has to be reinstalled.

Some staff have been dispatched to vacant desk space in other Government departments so that they can at least carry on the major audit of the Government?s Consolidated Fund, but the ad-hoc arrangements are inefficient.

What has happened has strengthened Mr. Dennis? conviction that the Office of the Auditor General should become a quango so that it has control of its destiny when it comes to such things as leasing office facilities.

When he heard about the office move in his absence, which he described as ?an outright plan to get at the Auditor General? he considered tendering his resignation but decided this would play into the hands of Works and Engineering and Housing Minister David Burch. He has instead decided to do all he can to force changes to make the Office of the AG an autonomous quango able to look after its own affairs.

Mr. Dennis is president of the Caribbean Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions, an offshoot of the Vienna-based International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions through which his intended report will be passed to the UN.

The Auditor General believes his office has been deliberately ?attacked? to bring him to heel after last month?s annual report revealed $800 million of public money in Government stewardship could not be readily checked.

The Office of the Auditor General is the independent watchdog of Government?s financial affairs. Its mission statement is ?to add credibility to Government?s financial reporting and to promote improvement in the financial administration of all Government departments and controlled entities.?

According to Mr. Dennis it was his office that last September first alerted W&E to the fact its lease of the fourth floor space would expire on May 23.

W&E has responsibility for housing all Government and related offices. Mr. Dennis and Sen. Burch met in December and a proposal to shift the office to Southside was declined for operational reasons.

In February a rental and lease agreement was made to secure the vacant third floor at Victoria Hall, but the new office remained in a vacant and unprepared state.

With the clock ticking a series of memos and letters were exchanged between the Ministry and the Auditor General?s office with Mr. Dennis and his staff increasingly anxious about what was going to happen.

It was only on May 5 that W&E delivered an office plan for the third floor. The arrangements were deemed unworkable and were not agreed by Mr. Dennis. He left the Island two days before the office lease expired, expecting W&E to have extended the fourth floor lease while either re-working its new office plan or, at the very least, starting work to equip the office as laid out on their plan.

Instead, at 4 p.m. on May 27 the Ministry of W&E announced it was sending a removal team the following day to cart furniture from the Office of the Auditor General downstairs to the vacant space. ?It would have taken eight to 12 weeks to implement their May 5 plan even if we had accepted it. My going away had no influence on their ability to implement the plan. There was no reasonable expectation the move would be done while I was gone,? said Mr. Dennis. ?I do not think any Government office space has been moved into a totally unprepared space.

?I thought the Minister was going to say I?d received his last word and he would implement the plan and we would need to prepare to move on, say, July 31. I?d expected them to give me an office space that was usable before they moved me into it. There responsibility is to make the office usable.?

Sen. Burch last week said the new office dimensions for the Office of Auditor General follow an overhaul of Government office space rationale completed in April to reduce the cost of housing Government departments and related parties in privately leased office blocks. The office space dimensions are based on such considerations as number of staff employed.

Mr. Dennis, whose personal office is now too small to properly accommodate guest chairs, said: ?From February to May instead of fitting out the office they designated new standards and these standards were, in my view, designed specifically to fit the space available here.

?I know these new standards will not allow this office to run efficiently.?

He invites the public to view the offices of the Department of Public Prosecutions to see how other Government offices exist. I?m not suggesting I want that or that other Government offices should be like that, but consider that 13 years ago we were in a space that was 4,370 sq ft and ended up experiencing difficulties due to a change in the staff mix and expansion of IT systems.

?We were finding that a squeeze and eventually moved on. Now, 13 years later we are told to squeeze into 3,700 sq ft.?

He said the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions has determined the importance of an independent Auditor General?s office in developed and developing countries that aspire to ?true democracy?.

Mr. Dennis said: ?The Auditor General is not the enemy of the Government, they are actually allies.

?The AG?s office must identify waste and inefficiency when it sees it and the Government should recognise that.?

And he added that the best way for his office to secure independence from Government was to become a quango, something he is now seeking to have legislated.