* Re-run from yesterday due to techncial problems* – Hatton closes off firmly on NTIA Saga, but Caruso stands by his accusations

Friday, 07 Jun, 2006 0

Mike Hatton, AFTA CEO made it very clear to The Mole in an interview late yesterday that in his opinion, there has been no circumvention whatsoever of the rules related to the NTIA process nor of any corrupt action, as Adrian Caruso of TA Fastrack has claimed.

Mr Hatton also revealed, “The audit of the awards process is complete, with 80 duplicate votes across 24 categories lodged, interestingly all in the last 48hrs after Mr Caruso’s intervention.” He confirmed. “All duplicates have been eliminated.”

Mr Hatton added, “The awards will go ahead as planned, but as a final check, voting reports will be rerun again to determine any change in the final line up, but all the evidence says that there will not be”.

Mr Hatton, vehemently denied Mr Caruso’s accusations, saying, “We have used an ID system which allows us to identify every vote, where it comes from, the name of the company, what date it was lodged and what time, so irrespective of Mr Caruo’s encouragement of multiple voting, it would have had no impact whatsoever. The integrity of the awards has been maintained, without question”.

Mr Hatton concluded by saying, “Our confidence is demonstrated by the fact that the finalists are on the AFTA website and I do not anticipate there will any change.”

The Mole also spoke with Adrian Caruso of TA Fastrack who said, “We simply sent out an email in good faith as did many other operators to get agents to vote for us and this revealed that agents had already voted”.

“When we uncovered this, all we did was merely provide the advice received from others given to them by Question Pro, that they should simply delete the cookies and they could vote more than once”.

Mr Caruso strongly refuted claims made by AFTA CEO Mike Hatton that the company tried to circumvent the system for the NTIA awards, adding, “We were trying to help people who were having difficulty with the on-line voting system provided to vote in the awards”.

“You would think that AFTA would appreciate us pointing out a flaw in the system, which would enable them to achieve even greater integrity, but by being accused of trying to rort the system, it makes us look bad to the industry, which is clearly not the case”.

He added, “It has to be asked now if AFTA is aware that there are multiple votes from an agency and if they have eliminated the duplicates, how do they know that they have eliminated the correct and valid ones?”

“I still believe the voting process needs to be re-run and an individual url or identifier provided to each agency manager for them to vote on behalf of the agency and it is only then that the true integrity of the awards will have been achieved”.

When Mr Caruso spoke with The Mole he made The Mole aware that he was at that time sitting in an sitting in an agency in Melbourne who told him that nine individual agents in that agency had voted.

“The fact of the matter is that the on-line voting system being used by the awards is not accurate and does not follow the NTIA Awards rules of one vote per agency”, Mr Caruso said, adding, “The matter is not one of semantics, Mr Hatton, rather AFTA have used a system that is inaccurate and therefore the awards are also inaccurate and should be re-run”.

Report by The Mole