Fancy yourself as a sleuth?
Today, Stuff.co.nz provides readers with the chance to absorb contentious MPs' expense claims and receipts and determine what is worthy of further investigation.
After an extraordinary week that has seen three Labour MPs demoted for misusing their credit cards while Labour was in power, we are placing thousands of receipts and documents online for you to see if you can spot anything we missed.
The company has drawn its inspiration from the Guardian newspaper in Britain, which enlisted the help of readers to research tens of thousands of MPs' expense claims.
A crowdsourcing application has been launched today and will be added to, both in content and functionality, over coming days.
What a great idea! If we didn't have a full day of work ahead of us, we'd be first in the queue, because we LOVE to help! Meanwhile, Tracy Watkins gives an insight into the breadth of the task ahead:
Political editor Tracy Watkins says it has been a marathon effort to check each item of expenditure, with most offices still only part-way through the task. Given the scale of the job, she says it has been impossible so far to give many documents more than a cursory examination – although our research is continuing.
"But we have spent the past few days scanning the documents so we can make them available to our readers online. Now we ask for your help in sifting through the claims and receipts to spot anything we may have missed."
As we said above, this is an excellent innovation by the Dom-Post. It will be interesting to see what a bit of amateur detective work can come up with.
3 comments:
Yes this is a good idea.
Better still would be having all expenses published in a searchable database.
That would being a dose of much needed accountability.. and I dare say it would deliver fewer [cough]'mistakes' where personal expenses find their way on to the taxpayers tab.
I'm guessing that will be the next step; the Dom_post story suggested that this is just for starters. And I agree wholeheartedly.
And whilst I am vehemently against the ETS, I have to give John Key a big thumbs up for pushing for transparency in this area. Irrespective of past misdeeds, it should provide a far better and more accountable system going forward, especially with quarterly releases.
I just did 50 pages of Rick Barker 2004. Not a big spender and I only marked a couple for investigation.
The most noticeable thing was that he had to be chased up most months to provide receipts and a lot were substitutes. Indicates poor office management.
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