A row broke out at the Hadleigh Town Council Annual General Meeting on Tuesday.

Roger Young, a Hadleigh resident, asked the newly re-elected Mayor, Cllr Gordon McLeod, when the council will stop breaking their own Financial Regulations.

He quoted Clause 4.8 where the Responsible Financial Officer (RFO) is charged to produce comparable budget figures. Each quarter throughout the last year the RFO had stated with the figures - " … budgets are missing where accounting software is malfunctioning".

Nevertheless, Xero (UK) Ltd., the software company continued to be paid a monthly fee whilst apparently failing to fix the problem.

Cllr McLeod, who failed in his bid to become a district councillor, duly confirmed that the relevant budget figures would be available in future but, before he could finish his comments, the town clerk – Wendy Brame – interjected that this would depend on the software being fixed.

At that point the infuriated resident demanded that this should have been done a year ago. He claimed Councillors had been misled on the state of the Council's finances as a result.

He quoted an example where the Council had agreed to spend £8,000 based on a flawed business plan and overstated reserves.

In an interview after the meeting Roger Young explained that Suffolk Association of Local Councils (SALC), the Council's Internal Auditors, should, if diligent, highlight the many errors and inconsistencies in the finance figures in their annual review. He also explained that a simple Excel Spreadsheet could easily be used to reproduce the missing figures. A year ago, he highlighted gross errors in the 2022/23 budget.

Sadly, these variances of over 50% were proved right. They resulted in a significant overstatement of reserves.

He claimed that similar errors were made in the current year budget. These again will be hidden from the newly elected Councillors and residents as long as the claimed software problems prevail.