“The current controversy over the $3.1-billion ‘MIA’ is a graphic illustration of how MPs have lost the ability to ‘follow the money.’ The estimates are nearly incomprehensible, the departmental reporting is sketchy and inconsistent, and the auditing after the fact often raises more questions than answers,” NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.), chair of the Government Operations and Estimates Committee, told The Hill Times. “How do we know if the approved spending met its intended objectives or if it was even used for the approved purpose? We don’t. And I think governments like it that way.”
Liberal MP Ralph Goodale (Wascana, Sask.) agreed that the system of Parliament’s approval of the government’s $252.5-billion in spending is flawed. “The system of asking for the money and then approving the money in Parliament, and then reporting on the money to Parliament, is so disjointed and convoluted, it is very difficult to get a clear picture of exactly this is where this dollar began and this is where it ended up. What is the flow of events between the two?” he told The Hill Times last week.
“I think this is an aspect of democratic reform and Parliamentary reform that is really crucial for the future. It is a turgid subject. It’s a great interest to accountants and actuaries, but it is fundamental to accountability in a democratic society. I think that needs to be a priority for Parliament in the future to get a grip on the spending,” Mr. Goodale said.
Mr. Goodale said there are “insufficient reporting mechanisms” when it comes to keeping account of programs that cross over several government departments, and there is an “inadequate reporting system” for that information to come back to Parliament.
“I think that is a fundamental flaw that several governments for a long time have recognized. When you put together these processes of putting together the budget, issuing the estimates, issuing the supplementary estimates, reporting on spending in public accounts, there are always gaps of weeks or months or years between those events and it’s very difficult for people to get a clear, accurate picture of government spending when it’s all chopped up in different ways. And the way of calculating the numbers from one report to the next are different, and when there’s just no way that an ordinary human being can assemble all of this information in a coherent way that is accurate and informative,” he said.
In his spring report to Parliament, Auditor General Michael Ferguson found that the government could not account for $3.1-billion of funding for the Public Security and Anti-Terrorism Initiative between 2001 and 2009. In total, $12.9-billion was allocated to the PSAT Initiative, overseen by Treasury Board Secretariat, following the attacks on the World Trade Centre in the U.S. in 2001. The departments and agencies that received the funding reported $9.8-billion was spent on the initiative but Mr. Ferguson’s office said it could not find or explain what happened to the rest of the $3.1-billion allotted for the program.
Mr. Ferguson’s report said that although the Treasury Board Secretariat required departments and agencies to report on progress of how the PSAT money was spent, the information was not compiled by Treasury Board in a clear manner.
“We asked secretariat officials for the summary reports but were informed that they had not been prepared. As well, we noted that it was not clear what the summary reports were to contain. Departmental performance reports contained information on some departments’ initiatives, and government-wide information was collected by the secretariat,” Mr. Ferguson said in his report.
“The secretariat was the sole government department collecting detailed performance information on public security investments and stated that it would leverage the reporting and evaluation provisions as it gathered information from departments and agencies. However, there was no obligation to provide a government-wide perspective. In our view, this resulted in a lost opportunity to the government to report on the overall PSAT Initiative,” Mr. Ferguson said.
Mr. Ferguson said there could be three reasons he couldn’t find the money: “The funding may have lapsed without being spent; it may have been spent on PSAT activities and reported as part of ongoing programs spending; [and] it may have been carried forward and spent on programs not related to the initiative.”
Mr. Ferguson told reporters later, “We didn’t find anything that gave us cause for concern that the money was used in any way that it should not have been.”
In response to opposition questions in Question Period about the issue, Treasury Board President Tony Clement (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.) said that the information is available.
“This chapter has to do with the categorization of expenses by the Treasury Board between 2001 and 2009. All of the money in question is accounted for in the public documents tabled in Parliament, including the public accounts,” he said.
NDP MP Peggy Nash (Parkdale-High Park, Ont.) said last week, however, that while that may be true, the onus is on the government to tell Canadians exactly how that money was spent, if it was.
“The auditor general was unable to verify how that money was spent and he has significant authority to investigate documents, even classified documents and was unable to find it, so it’s very troubling that this government would take such a slipshod approach to taxpayers’ dollars, that they cannot account for such a significant amount of money that was supposed to be spent for public security,” she said. “This is the whole period of a heightened attention to terrorism around the world and when Canadians were calling on their government to act and make sure their public safety was protected, I think Canadians have a right to know what did this government do with that money?”
Mr. Goodale said it’s possible to trace the money and the government should “recreate the roadmap” for it so that Canadians know exactly what happened.
“There has to be a paper trail within the government that identifies the money flow. The issue here may be that some departments along the line did not properly identify the expenditures that they were making. That is frustrating for Members of Parliament and for auditors and for the public when the identification of spending gets obscured,” he said, noting that in 2010, the AG found something similar when $50-million came out of a border infrastructure fund and used for G8 and G20 funding rather than what it was intended for. In that case, however, the auditor general was able to see clearly a paper trail that showed where the money was being spent and for what purpose.
It would be in the government’s interest to find out exactly what happened, Mr. Goodale said, noting that if it’s true nothing nefarious happened with the $3.1-billion or if it was not misspent, accounting for it would clear the air. “Rather than saying, ‘Oh there’s no problem, move on to another topic,’ they are leaving a $3.1-billion unanswered question and that will leave a lingering doubt for a long, long time that something bad happened. Well, if something bad happened, fess up and if it wasn’t wrong doing or an error, then work through the arithmetic, reconstruct that flow of events,” he said.
Mr. Martin said keeping track of government spending needs to be more transparent. The Government Operations Committee recently completed a study on the estimates process and how difficult it is for Parliamentarians to do their primary job to keep the government accountable for public funds.
“If there is one thing the Government Ops Committee learned while studying the estimates process for our recent report, it is that there’s a great deal of room for abuse when it’s so difficult to follow the dollar from concept to program to audit afterwards,” Mr. Martin said. “There should be a movement to ‘plain language’ in financial reporting so the public can better understand what their government is doing with their money.”
Mr. Goodale agreed, saying that the auditor general has flagged a “very big issue” that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: BEA VONGDOUANGCHANH
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