Auditor’s Report: How Gov’t. Is Wasting Your Money
Posted May 12, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s the kind of thing that drives Canadians crazy: the government wasting their money. Before the Auditor General’s report became a regular highlight in Ottawa, there was no way to confirm your suspicions. But now the facts and figures of Sheila Fraser’s handiwork, released Tuesday, may have you shaking your head all over again.
Take what the nation’s ultimate bookkeeper found when she examined the Canada Revenue Agency, which certainly knows a thing or two about money. They’re cited for paying at least $90 million in unnecessary interest charges to businesses that park tax overpayments at the federal agency to take advantage of higher rates.
Her audit only covers the last three years but Fraser believes it’s been going on since at least 1991. “The agency has a responsibility to ensure that it does not make large interest payments that could be avoided,” she chides. “It has recognized for years that certain corporations might be leaving large balances in their accounts to take advantage of favourable interest rates.”
In another sure-to-aggravate finding, Fraser discovered that the federal government hired a consultant to help it develop funding programs. The problem? The employee they put on the payroll from Bronson Consulting Group just happened to work for some of the companies that wound up being awarded the contracts.
She calls it a giant conflict of interest that someone at Natural Resources Canada should have caught. And she claims it’s not the first time she’s found these obvious problems in the system at the federal level.
Also on the list of questionable tactics: a tandem report from the Environment Commissioner that says the feds are looking at their green plans with rose coloured glasses, overstating goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions with estimates that can’t really be met.
The Tories rejected the previously signed Liberal government’s Kyoto Protocols, replacing them with a more modest 20 per cent reduction by 2020. But the report found there’s so much red tape to get to that green, it may not be possible to achieve even the altered goals and there’s no way to measure whether companies are actually meeting the targets.
Auditor General Highlights:
- Poor accounting at the Defence Department cost the military $300 million in 2007-08 in unspent funds that had to be returned to the treasury.
- Corporations have been depositing unnecessary cash with the Canada Revenue Agency to profit from the agency’s generous interest rates — a corporate benefit that costs taxpayers $30 million a year.
- A consultant for Natural Resources designed funding programs, then worked for groups that successfully applied for the money – a clear conflict of interest that the department ignored.
Federal departments are failing to assess the impact on women of policies and legislation, despite a 1995 commitment. - The Crown corporation that manages federal bridges is so short of cash that key bridges in the Montreal area could become safety risks.
- Sloppy monitoring of “intellectual property” produced by departments – patents, copyrights and industrial designs – is undermining potential commercial returns.
- The environment commissioner says the federal government has overestimated the effectiveness of its climate-change program in reducing greenhouse gases.
With files from the Canadian Press
