Sir John Bryant Bourn was a British auditor who was the Comptroller and Auditor General and therefore a head of the National Audit Office.
16 Facts About John Bourn
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John Bourn entered the UK civil service at the top-entry level.
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John Bourn worked in the Air Ministry before spending a year at HM Treasury.
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John Bourn then spent time at the Civil Service College, Ministry of Defence and the Northern Ireland Office, where he was for some time Deputy Under Secretary of State, the UK government's most senior civil servant in Northern Ireland.
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John Bourn was a Deputy Under Secretary of State in the Ministry of Defence before he became the Comptroller and Auditor General on 1 January 1988.
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John Bourn was appointed the first Auditor General for Wales until Jeremy Colman took over this role on 1 April 2005.
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John Bourn was senior advisor to the Foundation for Governance Research and Education, where he specialised in corporate governance arrangements and improvements in the public and private sectors, particularly in banks.
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John Bourn was a part-time teacher at the London School of Economics from the time he was a graduate student, serving as a visiting professor from 1983 to 2013.
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John Bourn continued to teach at the School on executive and custom programmes, with particular reference to students and participants from overseas, including India, Indonesia, China and Hong Kong, Brazil, Thailand, Kazakhstan, and Spain.
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John Bourn specialised in issues of public sector management and policy analysis, including financial management, accountancy and audit, and covered UK and overseas experience.
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John Bourn started his career at the London School of Economics where he took a first class honours degree in Economics and a PhD.
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John Bourn was an Honorary Fellow of the University of Brighton, an Honorary Doctor of Laws of Brunel University, and an Honorary Doctor of Business Administration of the University of the West of England.
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Freedom of Information Act requests show that, in the three years to March 2007, John Bourn made 43 overseas visits; Private Eye claimed this was far more than the revenue generated would justify, and that in many cases more junior staff should have gone instead; on 22 of these trips, John Bourn was accompanied by his wife.
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In October 2015, Private Eye highlighted how criticisms of John Bourn's expenditure had been removed from Wikipedia, citing right to be forgotten.
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John Bourn was married to Ardita and they had a son and a daughter.
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John Bourn died on 22 November 2022, at the age of 88.