This blog is a solo project, recently described by Michael James as a “dynamic, tireless, takes-no-prisoners one-man show”. And though I’d like to think this commentary is correct, I’m the first to concede that even my critical eye occasionally misses things.

Here’s one such example. Just before Christmas, I visited the Companies House website to see when Resident Advisor’s accounts had to be declared. I’ve been curious for a while to see just how bad things got during 2020 for the company – and accounts up to New Year’s Eve 2020 had to be submitted by December 31st 2021.

Their publication was ultimately delayed by a few more days due to the Bank Holiday weekend in the UK at the start of this month – but I finally got my article published on January 7th. The figures revealed Resident Advisor made a loss of £576,685 during 2020, down from the modest £26,789 profit of 2019.

I also commented on the fact “the company was still able to pay out £65,120 in renumeration for its directors – down from £88,657 the year before”. I didn’t think much of this at the time, partly because I had other posts which needed preparing that day. But now I’ve had a rethink.

And as a result, I’m feeling pretty angry. By Resident Advisor’s own admission, they lost 95% of their income when the pandemic came along. They also made a number of what co-founder Nick Sabine described as “Covid-forced redundancies”. Yet the number of staff on the payroll increased from 33 in 2019 to 35 in 2020.

But the bit which really annoyed me was the payments made to the company’s directors. Who on earth deemed it appropriate that directors receive any kind of payments at all when a company has lost 95% of its income? Did no one at Resident Advisor wonder how it would look when this came out?

The truth is it would always have come out. Aside from the possibility of someone leaking this information out of the company, it was always going to be declared in statements to Companies House – so it leads me to believe one of two things happened. One, no one considered how it would look to be making payments to directors when sacking staff and reducing the hours of those left.

Or two, they knew exactly how it would look and didn’t care. Resident Advisor have been contacted for comment, but haven’t responded ahead of publication…