Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Haldane Place ·
The Audit of the Penny Returns
Pence drawn in the borough wages come back through the Haldane Place cash office as lodging on days no wage ever ran.
- filed: "at the mayoral audit"
- reference: "HP/PR/09"
1. This writ is entered on the quarterly examination of the cash office at Haldane Place, the pay office of the Borough, and concerns the returns of coin known in that office as the penny lodgings.
2. Wages in the borough service are drawn in coin at the counter, signed for on the wage sheets, and carried out in sealed pouches. Small sums come back. Whatever is over in a pouch is turned in at the window the same day; whatever is short is made good from the reserve; and both practices are receipted in the turn-in book against the date of the wage run that paid them. This is the trade of that office, and it has always balanced.
3. Two wage runs service the borough calendar, the early fortnight and the late fortnight, and their days are fixed by the wages schedule published each January. The turn-in book for the period under review is arithmetically exact. The reserve never stood short and never stood over. Every entry is signed at the window, countersigned at the cage, and carried into the weekly balance in its place.
4. The anomaly lies in the dating. Lodging is to be receipted only on a wage day, and only against the run that issued it. Twenty-nine entries in the period carry dates outside both runs: two Sundays, the market half-days, a Tuesday withdrawn from service under the schedule, and the morning of the mayoral audit itself, entered before the auditors had come through the door.
5. All twenty-nine entries are pennies. No other denomination is lodged on those dates, and no other denomination is lodged at all at that window on those dates. The amounts are small and the entries are faithful. The signatures, compared against the wage sheets by an examiner brought in for the purpose, are those of established recipients of borough pay.
6. The recipients were approached at home under the ordinary procedure. Each remembered the wage, each recalled the pouch, and each recalled turning nothing in. The pennies themselves are of the current issue, no older than any coin in the reserve. Weighed, they are pennies. Counted, they are the receipts. Asked where they had been, the pennies are not in a position to say.
7. Miss Quill, Deputy Collector, who has kept the turn-in book eleven years, was asked how lodging could be entered for a day no wage ran. Her answer is minuted in her own words: "The wage is run against the day it wasn't run on, or the day is carrying money no wage of ours ever paid out. The book doesn't know the difference, and I receipt it where the book puts it. If the Committee can open a day for me, I will open a page."
8. The office stands neither short nor over. Set one practice against the other and the borough is owed nothing and has returned nothing. It is only the calendar that will not meet, since the money returns as wages return, and keeps the hours as wages keep them, and keeps days that the wage diary has never once opened. The lodgings dated outside the schedule are to be kept apart in a ledger of their own until the matter is understood.
9. The Committee enters the matter here in the terms in which it was found, and the finding does not close: when the wage did not run, whose wage was it that came back?