The command not found looks like a PATH issue when your sudo gets its root shell. Updating the root profile /root/.bash_profile to set the PATH variable would fix that. Also, giving an absolute path to mad-admin in the sudo command would work as well.

PATH=/home/neil/bin:$PATH;export PATH

My vote would be to fix the permissions. You can do that with a recurisve chown(chown -R neil /home/neil)