pronto said:Typical Media hyperbole. The books weren't cooked! They reported costs on differing fiscal years with the advice and consent of the Comptroller General. Sheila didn't like that - too bad... No one cooked any books, and all the monies were accounted for (from 2003 on, anyways)
pronto said:Typical Media hyperbole. The books weren't cooked! They reported costs on differing fiscal years with the advice and consent of the Comptroller General. Sheila didn't like that - too bad... No one cooked any books, and all the monies were accounted for (from 2003 on, anyways)
Hebridean said:Those darn liberals unlike the glorious Conservatives who have never done anything I mean anthing wrong. Especially to the military. They never make huge promises to the military and break them, oh and Kim Campbell was the best defence minister ever, ever. (period)
2 Cdo said:Yes the Liberal party was the best thing to ever happen to Canada! :
yeah, she was a real treat, that one. Someone shoulda slapped her upside head with a halibut! Whack! (Actually, I'd pay good money to see that. We should make that someone's permanent posting in Parliament. You say something really stupid and WHAP! Big ol' fish to the face.)Michael Dorosh said:She did great things for gun owners as Justice Minister also IIRC.
pronto said:OAG was complaining about the charges being placed into the wrong years and off the wrong accounts... They weren't cooking books, they were reporting costs in an unexpected way.
a_majoor said:Doing a clean set of books means placing income and expenditures in the expected way. Anything else is fraud.
;D HA! I love it! Gentleman Usher of the Stinky Fish... Jeez... He'd be busy. Easiest just to hold two fish at arm's length, and then just run rapidly down the centre of parliament delivering "whacks" to both sides at the same time... That oughta wipe the moustache off Jack Layton's face.paracowboy said:yeah, she was a real treat, that one. Someone shoulda slapped her upside head with a halibut! Whack! (Actually, I'd pay good money to see that. We should make that someone's permanent posting in Parliament. You say something really stupid and WHAP! Big ol' fish to the face.)
pronto said:never said that, just said the media were wrong comme d'habitude... They got it wrong. OAG was complaining about the charges being placed into the wrong years and off the wrong accounts... They weren't cooking books, they were reporting costs in an unexpected way. Salient fact - they were reporting costs...
Liberals tick me off. So do Conservatives though... Must be getting cranky in my old age. ;D
How they concealed the gun-centre funds
Couched in the dry jargon of accountants, stuffed with endless acronyms, the Auditor-General's report this week on the gun registry threatens to slip off the nation's radar screens. That would be a shame.
In two separate chapters, with meticulous detective work, Sheila Fraser has chronicled a tale of bureaucrats, and perhaps their political masters, conspiring to conceal the fact that gun-centre spending had exceeded its authorized annual limits. Such unusual abuse may affect the ancient privileges of Parliament itself. As Ms. Fraser grimly noted, this misdeed "is a very serious and a very, very rare occurrence in government. It is more than simply a disagreement between accountants." In fact, it is the complex saga of desperate bureaucratic schemes to shuffle cost overruns from one fiscal year to another.
The Auditor-General's troops got their first hint that something was amiss when they settled down to audit the Canadian Firearms Centre's 2004-05 expenditures. Bingo: There was an error. The centre had mistakenly recorded $21.8-million for its new super-duper information system -- which is not yet in use -- on the 2004-05 books when that amount should have been included in the previous year.
So the auditors went back in time, peering through the books of previous years. They concluded that the centre did not count the money in 2003-04 because that would have meant another visit to the House of Commons to ask for more money in the supplementary estimates. (The Auditor-General delicately did not mention that this would have meant bad publicity on the brink of the 2004 election.)
But why were the 2003-04 allocations inadequate? It turns out that in 2002-03, when the firearms centre was still under the control of the Justice Department, the then-Liberal government had pledged that spending that year would not exceed $100.2-million. So when spending on that super-duper system went over the limit, the bureaucrats shuffled $39-million forward from 2002-03 into 2003-04. Conveniently for them, there is somehow no written record of how or why this decision was taken. "In our opinion," Ms. Fraser's report notes, "it would likely have been of significant interest to Parliament that a major expenditure was not recorded in the correct fiscal year."
Meanwhile, with $39-million on its books at the start of a new year, the centre was barely treading water as it rolled into 2003-04. Its new system ran up even more bills. More money was required. By February of 2004, as the end of that fiscal year loomed, it became clear that more funds from the supplementary estimates were required. The report notes that "senior officials briefed ministers. It was decided that supplementary estimates were not desirable." In other words, no bad publicity. Something had to be done.
The solution should make every taxpayer's blood congeal. After much scrutiny of different accounting techniques and legalities, and after a key interdepartmental meeting at which no notes were taken -- and about which everyone's recollection differs -- the centre duly noted the $21.8-million as an "unrecorded liability" in its departmental performance reports and in the annual letter of assets and liabilities that it sends to the Treasury Board. Then it happily chronicled the amount under its 2004-05 expenses. Deed done. Then along came Ms. Fraser.
This is no mere case of cheque kiting. The House of Commons cannot control the public purse if it does not receive accurate spending records. Such spending oversight has been a venerable prerogative from Confederation. In fact, the 1867 order that conferred that power copied a resolution adopted in Britain in 1678. So the failure to produce accurate accounts "could be viewed as limiting Parliament's control of public spending." That, in turn, could be viewed as an infringement of the privileges of the House. (The House of Commons itself must decide that.) And that means that such bureaucratic conniving is more than an accounting fiddle.
In the wake of Ms. Fraser's report, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day suspended the requirement to register non-restricted weapons, and he put the RCMP in charge of the centre. That scored political points with a portion of his Conservative constituency. But the lessons of the gun registry should be required reading for every Ottawa denizen. It turns out that no matter how many rules there are, the rules do little good when bureaucrats across departments connive, and don't keep records of that connivance. That is a bitter lesson. The Auditor-General deserves our thanks.
Hebridean said:As well, I particularly enjoy how our Auditor General is finding all these scandals years after they occurred, maybe if she was doing her job better she would have immediately stopped the sponsorship and all the other scandals she has "found" (most of the scandals she has reported on were not discovered by her-what does they say about her capabilities) as soon as they started rather than them being allowed to persist for years. She is detailing how the barn door was left open after the horse was long gone- I would love for once to see her close the barn door before the horse leaves. ( I apologize for the farm metaphors).
Hebridean said:The violations of parliament are highly overstated. We do not live in the United States were every expense has to be cleared through Congress. Our system of government allows the executive to make financial decisions outside of Parliament that is why we have Governor General Warrants and Order in Council's where a cabinet minister can appropriate funds by getting the Governor General to sign off on it. I am not sure what the big deal is the money was reported just in the wrong year. Don't politicians tinker with the numbers all the time (i.e. Alberta is debt free. No actually it won't be debt free for a couple more years or so-but why let facts get in the way-let's report our financial situation of tommorrow today)
As well, I particularly enjoy how our Auditor General is finding all these scandals years after they occurred, maybe if she was doing her job better she would have immediately stopped the sponsorship and all the other scandals she has "found" (most of the scandals she has reported on were not discovered by her-what does they say about her capabilities) as soon as they started rather than them being allowed to persist for years. She is detailing how the barn door was left open after the horse was long gone- I would love for once to see her close the barn door before the horse leaves. ( I apologize for the farm metaphors). Good luck Sheila and stop the leaks from your office as some might accuse you of being partisian if this persists.