Sacked Bermuda Housing Corporation (BHC) manager Raymonde Dill last night hit back at the "incredulous" Auditor General's report into alleged mismanagement at the Government quango.

During an extensive interview with The Royal Gazette, he claimed many of the allegations levelled against him during his tenure at the agency had been unsubstantiated with statistics and said he had been made solely responsible for every single issue.

He strongly questioned the way Auditor General Larry Dennis had executed the special inquiry into BHC and said at no point did the Auditor attempt to interview him or gain further information. He said he was "shocked" at the language used in the report, more than the facts, and felt the auditor had been too free with his own "incredulous conclusions".

And Mr. Dill asked why the inquiry had only taken into consideration the year of 2001, when he claimed much of what the auditor had criticised in his report had been ongoing problems since well before he worked there - and, in some cases, problems that were much worse.

Yet, he said, none of that was mentioned in the scathing report on BHC, which claimed management was "out of control", as published in Monday's edition of The Royal Gazette.

Speaking from his Pembroke home yesterday, Mr. Dill questioned why many of the specific issues had not been raised during the annual audits on BHC in 2000 and 2001, while he was at the helm.

"The annual audit has a slightly different, lesser scope than the audit Larry Dennis did on BHC last year," said Mr. Dill. "However, the transactions he touched on during his special review, which give rise to virtually-impossible-to-verify transactions - in my mind it would be virtually impossible for him not to have found some of them in his previous reviews. Either he was not doing his job in the last two years or this report is an over-exaggeration. I think this report takes a number of specific cases and generalises them for the entire operation to prove some other points. And why is it that a report that deals with weaknesses in the financial controls does not mention at all the financial controller (Robert Clifford), who was at BHC for 13 years?

"I don't argue that the buck stops with the man at the top and I have no problem with my inclusion in any report, but you can't make sweeping statements about financial control weaknesses being pervasive without making mention of the financial controller."

In his report, which until leaked to The Royal Gazette had been placed in only a select number of hands, Mr. Dennis claimed the responsibilities of the board had virtually been abolished as the general manager Mr. Dill had "dominated" and "dictated" the running of the Government-funded agency.

And the Auditor said: "For many projects, functions such as selecting the contractor, signing the purchase order, approving the work done and authorising and signing the cheque were concentrated in one person - usually the general manager."

But yesterday, Mr. Dill said that simply was not true. He said two signatures were required on cheques, and it was the board of directors who signed contracts, not himself.

He agreed that there was $700,000 worth of loans outstanding that had been given by BHC and were not secured by a first mortgage when the auditor carried out his special review. However, he said the report failed to mention that when Mr. Dill took over in November, 1999, the unsecured loans were at more than $2 million. He said he personally set up a two-man team, bringing in somebody from outside, to secure the loans and complete the paperwork, and said he was close to seeing that task completed when he was suspended and sacked last year. He added: "I joined BHC in November, 1999. In mid 2000, the Auditor General signed and had presented to the public of Bermuda a clean audit report for the corporation covering the period ending December 1999.

"At the audit closure meeting, I sat opposite Mr. Dennis while he praised BHC for our performance and he also requested that BHC address, as a matter of urgency, the recommendations put forward relating to internal control weaknesses identified during the execution of their audit.

"These recommendations comprised a long list running to several pages covering the range of services provided by the Corporation - some of which had been on similar recommendation lists in previous years and had remained unaddressed by BHC management.

"The recommendations were alarming by their actual number, and the fundamental nature of some of them, but did not speak to mismanagement or gross financial control weaknesses, which his report today raises."

But Mr. Dill said he personally stated at that meeting that the situation was unacceptable and that BHC would address each point as a top priority.

He said the financial controller was instructed to develop a plan and during 2000 steps were taken to amend the situation. In 2001, he said BHC received "yet another clean audit" for the year ending 2000, and said BHC was praised for addressing many of the weaknesses on the recommendation list.

"In particular, I was proud of the fact that the unsecured loans had been brought down to $700,000 and the plan in place would reduce this even further during the coming months and that the basic accounting department controls had been implemented.

"But based on The Royal Gazette's report, the loans were out of control, the financial controls non-existent, and transactions impossible to verify. What are we expected to believe? There is such a disconnect between this report and the report he issued in mid-2001 and mid-2000."

Mr. Dill said it was "nonsense" that contractors provided any old price for BHC work and argued that after the allegations first broke in March of last year, he asked Woodbourne Associates to provide directly to the auditor their costing for three jobs carried out at BHC, which the Auditor General had also had independently surveyed as part of his report.

He said two of the Woodbourne estimates were higher than what BHC had paid and said the third was just marginally less.

But Mr. Dill said the auditor had also complained that he could not find documentation about the scope of the work carried out, and if this was the case he questioned how he then managed to ask independent companies to quote prices for that same work. He added: "I suspect that if the auditor, by his own admission, could not find documentation of the scope of a lot of the work done, it is not surprising that his surveyors produced costings for work of which they had no idea of the scope.

"The auditor is quoted as saying that I was a dictator and implied that I did everything inside the organisation. I am good, but not that good.

"More specifically, he says that on occasion Mr. Dill was solely responsible for every facet of a transaction. What rubbish."