Auditor General blasts legislature books

VICTORIA (NEWS1130) – BC’s auditor general is blasting the bookkeeping of the provincial legislature.
    
In his now-released audit of the Legislative Assembly’s financial records, John Doyle says he can’t form an opinion of the House’s financial records for three years: 2009, 2010, and 2011.
    
Doyle says he began the audits some time ago because of a lack of progress on a report he issued in 2007.
    
“Almost immediately when we walked into the Legislative Assembly, we realized that there were fundamental problems with the financial controls,” Dolye says.

“The most obvious and stunning of which was the lack of bank reconciliation for many years. Bank reconciliation is a basic fundamental control which makes sure that you know where your money’s going and the financial records and the bank did not match up,” he says, arguing all the corrections needed are very significant.

“In a recent iteration of the audit – because we’ve done this audit three times now with only limited improvement in the control framework – the financial records showed an overdraft of $130 million on the bank account, and the bank statement showed zero and there was no explanation whatsoever in regard to the gap between the two figures.”

Asked if he found anything illegal, Doyle says an auditor typically keeps an eye out for issues around misappropriation or fraud and do different tests if need be.  “We were so overwhelmed by the amount of work that we had to do to check everything, that that additional testing and that additional work will have to wait for another day.”
    
“What we found was so bad in regard to the actual quality of the financial information, that we just focused in on that first.”
    
Doyle is recommending the legislature immediately act to fix the problems he thinks his office has found.

The report comes just a day after Doyle criticized the government’s deficit calculations in its public accounts release, arguing the Liberal government has under-reported the deficit by more than $500 million.
    
Finance Minister Kevin Falcon disagreed with Doyle, saying BC has followed accounting practices used across North America.

Taxpayers should be fuming, says analyst

A political analyst says the auditor general’s report highlights how much legislative activity is conducted in secret.

Sean Holman points out the findings in the report are nothing new. The affairs of the legislature have never been subject to freedom of information requests, meaning reporters and ordinary citizens are not allowed to know what is happening with taxpayers’ money.

“When activities are conducted in secret at public institutions, things to wrong,” he insists.

“And that includes spending on constituency offices and spending on caucuses,” he notes.

But he says MLAs had it coming, because of a similar auditor general’s report five years ago.

“And that’s what’s so shocking about this. The Legislative Assembly didn’t respond to the original recommendations.”

He says it remains to be seen if things will change, since it’s in the public, but not necessarily in the MLAs’ interest, to improve transparency.

He says we only need to look at Alberta to see a provincial legislature that is far more open.