FSA spent £16m on consultants last year

If george Osborne wants an example of . wasteful spending - he need look no further.

This unelected quango is out of control.

The rest of the country is being asked to live within their means. We in FS have no control over the spending at canary wharf.

We have had to curb our own expenses on the one hand whilst being faced with ever increasing costs from the regulator.

The fsa must be made accountable.This is no longer acceptable.

We would all like to employ outside consultants to shoulder some of the burdens we face. Unlike the regulator we cannot afford this luxury.

A cost/benefit analysis of advantage to consumers of this profligate spending must be made .We are all entering an age of austerity, the regulator must not be an exception.

Hear that PWC are being paid by the FSA for consultancy, PWC are the adminstrators for Keydata and PWC were teh auditors of keydata before it's collapse.

Surely there is a bit of a conflict of interest or are they really good at chineese walls.....

Everyone needs to know Mark Hoban (man in charge of FSA) has mates in PWC. That may explain why he is pro FSA and RDR.

Palm being greased comes to mind!

Mark Hoban worked at PWC from 1985.

Theefore any appea to him to stop this madness is likely to fall on deaf ears.

The fact that the fsa is not funded through the tax system makes it no less of a drain on society. Maybe we should employ an outside consultant ( not PWC) to tell us all who is really benefitting from this quango.

I doubt very much it is consumers.

Visit the Adviser Alliance website for instructions on what to do next. Enough small voices protesting in unison may eventually become a clamour so loud that it cannot be ignored.

Have the staff that received the "free tax advice" been notified to the Revenue via P11D and charged tax on a benefit in kind?

Every other ordinary mortal would be!!!!

If enough e-mails each day start to arrive in the in-boxes of MP's acros the nation, then sooner or later a few will start to take notice.

From bbc news business page today

"The new government sees reducing the burden of regulation as a vital priority in helping free enterprise and enabling our economy to grow Red tape has become a huge problem and I am determined to overcome it."

Mark Prisk

Business minister

Mark Prisk is married to lesley titcomb of the fsa

maybe he should have a word with his wife.

Either that or stop spouting nonsense.

Will Hector Sants be leaving a note for his successor telling him/her that there's no money left? Just a thumping great overdraft. It's called a public sector regulatory deficit.

BTW, if you forward a copy of this page to your MP, make sure you enter your full postal address.

what a bunch of cynics, the people in charge only have your best interest at heart. Never would they look to undermine the service provided by the bad IFAs and nice bank people. Everyone needs to take a leaf out of the banks service charter books and look after their clients properly. Only then will the poor clients get rid of the confussion caused by the advice vs getting ripped off issues we have at the now.

Why should advisers expect to have a business to sell to fund a comffy retirement. They don't need the trail commission, so give it back to the clients who will need it to help cover the cost incurred when the nice bank people re write the plan into a nice safe bank product with none of those nasty charges the IFAs have made them pay.

jobs for the boys rulz ok

Now let's ask who at the FSA benefited from what entertainment offered by those with their heads in the trough.

Sigh! I don't think there's anything else to say.

I've just noticed that another name appears in this article who are associated with the Keydata debacle - Deloitte who are handling the compensation payments......

Please Daily Telegraph can we have a report on how our money is spent at canary wharf?

I guarantee you will have a bigger scoop than the MPs expenses scandal.

These expenses do not rest at the feet of advisers, as costs are inevitably passed on to consumers. They have a right to know whether or not the fsa is value for money.

It is we who spent this amount on consultants - after all it is our money.

What I find hard to comprehend is what these consultants do that the FSA staff is incapable of doing themselves. Indeed are we paying twice over? Salaries for the Canaries - who appear not to do the job they are engaged for and then pay for the consultants because the aforementioned are either too idle or incapable of doing themselves.

I see from today’s Telegraph that the cumulative cost of regulation for UK business since 1998 has been £88.3 billion. Surely this excludes financial services – we have a £1.7 bill in prospect for the RDR alone, so can anyone give a fair assessment of what regulation has cost financial services and what benefit has been derived from that expenditure?

What I also find hard to comprehend is that while Boy George is prepared to have a watchdog over the Treasury, there is still no indication of any control, oversight or answerability for one of the largest and most expensive Quango’s in the UK.

I wonder if they listened to these ones?

The ones they employed who said an RDR as it was later named, was a bad idea, were ignored and they continued regardless. Looks like that error and possibly others like it may cost them their jobs, or rather the people who are left in the firing line, the big rats have mainly left already as experienced freeloaders know when to exit a party.

Consultants are actually a good idea, as would be a private company audit team for self regulated individuals, but not on top of the costs of some of the most exclusive offices in London, 2,800 staff and the excesses of cost they run up. Even the audit team stay in offices of a higher class than regional managers are allowed in National companies, forgetting the ludicrous costs of 5 star hotels already documented.

How are excesses such as these allowed in this day and age and passed by a supposedly democratic government?

Under the Labour government the FSA had one objective only - to totally eliminate IFAs. (all in the interests of protecting the client, you understand) The truth is that if they wished to continue to waste money like this they needed to concentrate on forcing all business through banks, and knowing their ( the banks) attitude to fairness to clients, fine them large sums for mis-advice.

These fines then further lined the FSA's pockets, and kept their salaries safe . Let's see what this new coalition is made of and if things change now we have a conservative led coalition government

Financial crime - £16 million to write a couple of reports (with no attached liability - ever) where is the fiscal prudence and management competence ?

There is no money left and worse there is no scope to borrow any more either.

So the likes of Fiona Fry (ex FSA) is offered a role at one of these consultancies then lo and behold they are doing work for the FSA?

Is that the case with the other consultancies too?

Who is watching this lot?

The likes of HMRC and Customs and Excise run a massive organisation in a half reasonable manner, with no real major problems, this lot are all in one expensive barrel and no-one has any control over them.

Fiona Fry works for KPMG

It really is jobs for the boys & girls

They are an inner circle, scratching each others backs and billing us for the rich pickings to be had from the regulator.

Who IS benefitting from all of this money thrown at the fsa?

Is anything any better than before the fsas existance? are customers better off are the banks tcfing any better?

It is high time a thorough investigation into the goings on at canary wharf is carried out.

We have a right to know where our cash is going.

We must give our clients a clear service proposition.

It is only right we deserve the same from those who lord it over us.

Maybe I'm being a bit thick, but why should the FSA hire any consultants at all?

Surely the FSA (and any responsible employer!) would only employ someone who seems able to do the job for which they are hired?

It's the same pathetic arguement that crops up every so often about a referendum. The Government are elected to govern - not to pass the buck. So get on with it and make decisions yourself!

But back to the FSA: how much of that "consultancy" cost was paid to ex Eton, Rugby or Harrow pupils? Or ex Oxford or Cambridge students? Or any other "connected" (i.e. members of "the establishment") people?

Or is that just me being cynical?

"The FSA said it was too expensive to calculate its total spending on consultants and contractors in response to the Freedom of Information request."

Since when did anything being "too expensive" deter the FSA, except when it comes to living up to its own claim of being "an open and transparent regulator" (as claimed on its website)?

This is a completely mendacious excuse anyway ~ surely the total amount spent on outside consultants must be shown in the FSA's accounts for the year? Doesn't the FSA keep track of stuff like this? Of course it does. Then again, if it doesn't, that's more worrying still.

Write to your MP about this. We're all being royally ripped off by a totally unaccountable quango.

Reflecting on the disclosure of the FSA's astonishing expenditures I thought it might be pertinent to point out that in The Concise English Dictionery the word'Regulator' is explained as: Contrivance to produce uniformity of motion. 'Contrivance' is then explained as 'Artifice or device' and, to top this Artifice means 'Contrivance, trick, cunning skill'.

Does this ring any bells? The word 'cunning' seems extremely pertinent. What we have here is a quango that fits into all of the categories of 'Regulator' but does not appear to do what it is intended to do. Surely the Government should 'contrive' to send this 'device' called the SFA on a 'uniformity of motion', preferably out of business. That would do the 'Trick'.

On further reflection, I did not mean to demean the Scottish Football Association (see typo on second line from the bottom of the comment above). Last thing I would want is to find dozens of irate Scottish football fans in my garden taking it out on my greenhouse. Sorry SFA. I DID OF COURSE MEAN FSA.

I attended a wedding on the weekend and as one guest left someone commented that he worked in Canary Wharf.

I jokingly asked 'Not for thre FSA, I hope?'

Turned out he DID work for 'our regulator'.

He was just a small chap and the was a large pond to hand .... if only.....

Sorry chapsI let you all down.

Would it not be more prudent to employ qualified people:

It shows they are regulating a business they don't understand fully.

Know your customer?

The issues of tax treatment for seconded Staff?

Are they teaching them how to avoid UK tax