04 August 2016
Minimum Requirements
by Don Urquhart
This is written in praise of German bank auditors. They taught me a few things which I would like to pass on.
I worked for a German bank. Almost as soon as I joined my department in London I was visited by auditors from the Bundesfinanzamt in Berlin. They took us apart and made us clean up our act. It was my introduction to Mindestanforderungen, which translates as “Minimum Requirements.” It was life-changing in that it made me focus on what had to be done rather than what people would like to see done. I had many skirmishes with the German auditors over the years and the issues at the end of the day always came down to Mindestanforderungen. I could always say to them that I was only obliged to do what it says in the book and being German auditors they accepted this. At the end of the day though the auditors made us work more effectively. It was not always easy. There was often a power struggle between the London Office and Head Office. There were attempts to influence the auditors to produce biased reports and I was not averse to pointing this out. A classic case was Holger, an auditor I got on with very well, who told me that one of our key jobs should be done in Germany and not in London. I asked him to show me in the book why that should be the case and he backed off.
I have been reminded of Mindestanforderungen over the last few days. I visited Birmingham for the first time ever. We walked from the public affluence of Victoria Square a quarter of a mile down Hill Street, past countless rough sleepers and several casinos to the BacktoBacks Exhibition comprising 11 dwellings around a courtyard. They were built around 1840 and our guide took us though four homes, furnished as they would have been at various times between 1840 and 2001, when the last resident died. There was much talk of overcrowding, damp, bed bugs, tuberculosis and poor sanitation. Down in the courtyard were the three privies, illustrating progress from a bucket through to a water closet. I found myself wondering what were the minimum requirements of the people living there and how these must have changed over the years.
Furthermore, could the recent EU Referendum vote be ascribed to our failure to meet the minimum requirements of a large part of today’s population?
Stuart Rose started the Remain campaign complaining that Brexit would cause wages to rise, then Osborne threatened that house prices would fall and Cameron had foreign holidays costing more. The Chancellor followed up by saying that he would have to introduce a budget which would make life more austere. Your less well-heeled voter was thinking it might be good for wages to increase and house prices to fall and what’s a foreign holiday? And as to Osborne’s austerity threat they took the view that for them things couldn’t get any worse. Their minimum requirements were far from being acknowledged let alone satisfied.
Theresa May seems to be on to this. Her first speech after kissing hands at the Palace had her parking her social justice tanks on Corbyn’s lawn. Not surprisingly her promises were on the vague side but there was no mistaking that she intended to present her party as the saviour of the poor and vulnerable.
So what are people’s minimum requirements now?
Does it matter that Sir Philip and Tina can play Eeny Meeny about which of their yachts or aeroplanes they disport themselves in or upon, as long as everyone else is taken care of adequately? Of course the definition of minimum requirements might be contentious, but surely that discussion is preferable to the class war alternative.
As to my dispute with Holger about keeping key processes running in London, one of the bank’s rules was that the Germans could rewrite the book to suit themselves and in due course they did. But that’s another story.
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