Geelong players run onto the field in the first qualifying final last year. Picture: AFL Photos
GEELONG has been fined $40,000 for a breach of AFL Player Rules.
AFL General Counsel Andrew Dillon announced on Thursday that the Cats had breached the Total Player Payment (TPP) lodgement rules through an ‘inadvertent’ administrative error.
Dillon said the Cats had volunteered the breach as soon as it was discovered which had been taken into account when the AFL determined the penalty.
“We made an inadvertent administrative error in our TPP related reporting that has been repeated over eight years,” Geelong chief financial officer Simon Kelleher said.
“As soon as we discovered this error, we advised the AFL. The AFL investigated the matter and have passed down the sanction. We accept the penalty and have thoroughly reviewed our processes to ensure full compliance going forward.”
Considering it’s been called a TPP lodgement error rather than a TPP breach it wouldn’t surprise me if it was something stupid like who signed the forms.
8 years of the same mistake is the bit that makes my ears prick up. That’s gotta be a few people not doing proper reviews or paying attention to what’s going on.
Depending on what it was, it could be more likely for it to happen eight years in a row than only once. Someone makes a spreadsheet to do whatever calculations, plug in the numbers every year without thinking, someone new has to do the job one year and actually looks at the formulas and realises there’s a mistake.
Not saying that’s what happened, I’ve got no idea, but old spreadsheets written by Dave who doesn’t work here any more but he was real whiz with excel just plug in the numbers and remember to add GST and it’ll be fine as long as you don’t change that one cell, are everywhere.
Given the scale of the fine for the period in question, it would seem to be pretty trivial.
It’s poor optics by the AFL though - provide a little more detail on what the error was/how big it was and people wont jump to incorrect conclusions. (“No wonder they can afford Danger…” etc). All they had to say was that it didn’t cause GFC to go over the salary cap and its a non story.
They would have been better saying nothing at all, quietly taking a cheque from GFC for the 40k and moving on.
