Giles was a hospital administrator in a large NHS Trust. A qualified accountant, he had always worked in the public sector, initially in local government, then in social services and now in a vast hospital. He prided himself on running a tightly controlled regime where expenditure was closely monitored. He impressed on his staff, and anyone he ever spoke to about the budgeting process and financial controls, that they were entrusted with spending taxpayers’ money and that this was a responsibility that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Accordingly, all applications for expenditure submitted by the various departments in the hospital were subjected to especially careful scrutiny. Giles would often return an application, particularly if it was for non-medical items such as office furniture, laptops, or even adhesive tape and paper clips, with a note asking that it be fully justified.

However, when it came to operating his own departmental budget, Giles played by different rules. For the first ten months of the financial year he would be frugal, fretting over trivial items of expenditure and making tiny economies. It was as though he really did believe the old maxim that if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves. However, in the last two months of the financial year, he would change character and indulge in considerable largesse. His staff would suddenly be encouraged to spend, spend, spend. Then, as soon as the new budget came into effect, Giles would revert to being miserly.

Giles, as you’ve guessed, had developed budget dumping into a fine art. Not only did he jettison surplus funds with a lavish year-end bonanza, he was also skilful at building what he called ‘bunce’ into the budget. This was achieved by exaggerating items of expenditure at the time the budget was agreed; not too much, just enough to make it easy to under-spend. The combination of bunce in the budget and Giles’ frugal behaviour for ten months, guaranteed a handsome surplus by the year end. Having built up a surplus, it was essential to offload it before the next round of budget setting to avoid cuts.

All went well for the first couple of years of Giles’s stewardship. The bunce went undetected and the year-ends were marked with joyous spending binges. But then something happened to upset the equilibrium.

The Trust’s finance committee decided to clamp down on expenditure. The situation was grave. The Trust had been overspending and was in danger of running out of funds before the year-end. All unnecessary expenditure was frozen with immediate effect and all budgets were to be reviewed as a matter of urgency.

Unfortunately this was announced, without warning, in the ninth month of the financial year – exactly the time when Giles’ budget was showing generous surpluses. As it happened, Giles was one of the first to come under scrutiny. The committee was delighted to discover an unexpected nest-egg and the surplus that Giles had carefully amassed was transferred to a central budget.

In the next round of budget setting, Giles’s application for an increase in expenditure was firmly rejected. All the bunce was stripped out of Giles’s budget and the game was up.