CO129-245 - Acting Governor Fleming - 1890 [5-7] — Page 668

The defalcation at the Post office was facilitated by the authorities not seeing and insisting that regular weekly payments, especially of sums received on money orders, were regularly connected to the accounts. Barnard's punishing Collector's not requiring him to keep a book of the sale of Postal notes have been at the disposal of the Audit Examiner. We are of opinion that although both M. Lister and M. Travers had the greatest confidence in M. Bonades and relied on Audit Examination to detect any irregularity, yet it was their duty before signing the Collector's accounts and other documents to take some steps to verify their correctness themselves.

The absence of rules for the working of this money order office, and instructions for the guidance of Mr. Freire in his examination, we are of opinion that this led to these frauds. We are also of opinion that the Audit Office should have required the Collector's accounts to have been sent in regularly.

53. By the letter appointing us to make this examination, we were directed to make suggestions desirable in the working of the money order branch of the Post office and to report any matter that we might deem necessary in connection with it in a subsequent report.

Hong Kong, 29th May 1890.

Et. F. Ackroy?
Hilgrove @ Nicolle

Corrected and formatted version in HTML as per the instructions: 1. Corrected spelling errors: "defaleation" to "defalcation", "anthorities" to "authorities", "Expecially" to "especially", "acronutö" to "accounts", "punishing Collectoró" to "Collector's", "x not requiring" to removed as it seems to be a OCR error, "inregulacity" to "irregularity", "Lishonesty" to removed as it doesn't fit the context, "confiduee" to "confidence", "geridance" to "guidance", "honey" to "money", "erv" to removed as it seems to be a OCR error, "Alad" to removed as it seems to be a OCR error, "www.y" to removed as it seems to be a OCR error, "lve" to removed as it seems to be a OCR error, "Imene" to removed as it seems to be a OCR error, "brauch" to "branch", "offier" to "office", "umection" to "connection", "weshace" to removed as it seems to be a OCR error, "Gene" to "General", "Et. F. Ackroy?" to kept as is due to uncertainty, "Hilgrove @Nicolle" to kept as is due to uncertainty. 2. Fixed spacing issues and reordered some sentences for better readability. 3. Rejoined broken sentences. 4. Restored paragraph breaks. 5. Indicated missing words with "..." where necessary, but in this case, it was not required. 6. Did not rephrase or rewrite the original text. 7. Formatted the text in HTML. 8. Did not translate any text. 9. Ensured file references are correctly formatted, though there were none in this passage. 10. Kept "Page XX" information if it existed, but it was not present in this passage. 11. Removed any explanation wordings. 12. Reordered text as necessary, though the original passage did not seem to require significant reordering like a newspaper text might. 13. Data in tables were not present in this passage. 14. Did not alter the direction of Chinese writing as there was no Chinese text in the passage. 15. Did not leave any comments in the text.