Rob27172 said:
I have worked in financial services firms for 3 decades.
I can tell you nothing that any regulation has done has changed the3 nepotism in the industry - and never will.
The cheating and slight of hand or customer detriment or whatever you want to call it will not go away - it simply shifts from one area to another.
Fees for processing loans, then PPI premiums but you definitely get a loan, then a fee for having an account, or a fee for processing a cheque.
The financial services firms need to charge for what they do and will do whatever they can to make money from people regardless of rules and regulations.
As will cheats in sport do whatever they can to win.
On to your idea of Auditing.
So in the real world the auditors are paid by the company and they are "supposed to be independent" and find any areas of wrongdoing.
Well in my experience what they really do is highlight to the firm who is paying their wages where any areas of wrongdoing might get found out by the regulators and suggest better or "more legal" ways of doing what they want to do.
Lets not forget Enron, HBOS, LLoyds, Northern Rock, Parmalat, were all successfully audited every year. Hell even Maddoff was audited every year and got a clean bill of health.
Then we have the question of a sport with limited funds and struggling riders and teams and you want to overlay an unbelievably expensive audit process over them.
Finally lets look at how this already works - any company needs to provide accounts and if it is a government funded organisation it needs to have audited accounts. Unless of course it is a non profit or charity organisation.
I would be surprised if your plan to audit the whole of cuycling would run into a whole lot of issues as most of the race organisers and a lot of the teams holding companies that deal with the money will actually be charities and non profit organisation.
You see they know what the rules are and have a long time to work out how to make sure they can get around them .
It is the oldest game in the book
I don't want to go too much off topic, but a great deal of audits - and not just financial but governance audits - are not held by companies but by people like the IFC.
But yes, of course, you can't ever get rid of scandals and corruption - to some extent you're always going to have a people with less cash trying to chase down people with more funds who are ahead of the game.
You're right, it would probably be far too expensive to audit their governance, but I honestly cannot see a way things will get any better without some more rigorous, external scrutiny and enforced transparency. And I suppose that I think that public money is a way you can demand more of that if your were even remotely interested in cleaning things up. Let's face it, the accountability in cycling is a farce - you don't even need to scratch beneath the surface to see that things like the ZTP weren't worth the paper they were written on. Or the Movement for Clean Cycling, that people didn't join or simply dropped out of as soon as it gets inconvenient. It shows how weak any kind of 'self-governing' route really is. Then there are the guys who are supposed to be independent overseers seemingly far too close to the people they are meant to be scrutinising. And who gives a toss ? No one, apparently, because really, we / the sponsors / the journos / the guys running the sport etc., would rather have a heroic, victorious narrative (but don't look too closely) than the grafting unglamorous loser with what is laughingly known as 'sportsmanship'.
i guess it comes down to the don't call yourself white when you're grey comment, well made above. In some ways, I'd rather a plain dealing villain than the fig-leaf of PR BS. That's why I've always found guys like Vino easier to stomach than Brailsford and his 'go to the line but not beyond it'. At least with Vino, I feel he knows I'm in on the joke.
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