Noseworthiness

One of the things lost amid the House of Assembly spending scandal are the mistakes made by Auditor General John Noseworthy and his band of snoops.

Not putting commas in the wrong place things but 2 + 2 = 5 kinda screw-ups.

We're talking stuff like saying there were no more double-billing cases except for the two named and the one he inexplicably named and then dropped only to find out later that there were literally dozens of legislators with double-billing histories.

Like saying someone billed flowers to family members without actually checking to see if the Aunt Myrtle was actually just an elderly lady in the community and the flowers were sent to her following the local custom in many parts of Newfoundland of calling any elderly person "uncle" or "aunt".

Or like grossly low-balling the total amount of overspending in the allowances account so that the total uncovered by Noseworthy's audits is less than half the real amount , as revealed by Chief Justice Derek Green's investigation.

or waving around a bunch of invoices with the members' name on it and then having to admit that well, d'uh, like the cross between Horatio and Sheila (self-righteousness + exemplary math skills) hadn't bothered to rule out the possibility of forgery before accusing several members of wrongdoing.

All of which leads us to the Noseworthiness of The Telegram's serial attack on former member of the House of Assembly Oliver Langdon.

The root of the whole thing is one of the Auditor General's little bits of commentary, something about bills submitted to a point in the middle of the ocean.  Looks good on paper.  Highly quotable.

But is it correct?

Did anyone wonder if Noseworthy hadn't actually cocked up - yet again - and not conducted even a cursory investigation into the issue?  Apparently not.  You see, one clue to the idea that maybe these guys are way off course in the hunt for people diddling the taxpayer is the amount.  Langdon is accused by the Telegram of possibly, theoretically, like maybe dude, pocketing the princely sum of $16,000 extra on his allowances.

That's right.  A guy who sat a total of 18 years or so in the House of Assembly walked away at the end of it - and only if the Telly didn't frig up in their speculation - by less than a thousand bucks a year.

Remember the spit hurled at Percy Barrett, the supposed Fifth Man in the scandal when he was named by the Grand Inquisitor?  His numbers were small too, relative to the amount of cash flowing through his accounts.  Turns out the G.I. dinged Barrett for a bunch of things.  Like H.S.T which was really just part of a disagreement over how to apply the tax that the legislature doesn't pay against the books.  Not really fair, was it, since neither Barrett nor any other individual member actually set the policy?

But Noseworthy did it anyway.

And when you get The Torquemada de Torbay on the phone - if you can get him to even speak to a reporter again on the subject - someone might want to ask Noseworthy how much of Barrett's supposed overspending consisted of claims that Horatio's lab crew could have spotted as dubious even without running a check for possible forgery.

Just ask.

And then ask Barrett.

Had Noseworthy or The Telegram investigated they would have found a couple of things. 

First, Oliver Langdon was well known to travel to his district, doing his job, so frequently it was embarrassing to his colleagues.  The guy burned out a car a year, racking up mileage annually that most of us wouldn't see if four or five years of hard-core driving.

100,000 km a year?  No sweat.

Tires? Brakes? 

Langdon likely put mechanics' kids through medical school.

Second, Langdon's district is an odd one as island districts go.  To get to the western end of it, one must travel out towards Grand Falls before heading south along the highway; to get to the eastern end, one heads down the road to the Burin peninsula.

In other words, if Langdon had attended a dinner in eastern end of the district one night and an event in the west another night, the guy would actually go outside the district and travel through Goobies and out to Grand Falls before reaching his destination. Not exactly like driving around the Bay of Islands, for argument sake, but a good explanation of why Langdon racked up such high mileage.

That gets to be really important here when one considers that members of the House had two different mileage rates to bill:  one for travel between St. John's and the district and then another for travel within the district. In the not so hypothetical example above, one can see a real dilemma as to how to account for the mileage between the Burin peninsula and central Newfoundland.  It isn't travel to the district from St. John's, since St. John's couldn't be legitimately listed as the departure point. 

It isn't really travel inside the district partly since the mileage involved is horrendous compared to the crow-flying distance.  And it isn't travel within the district when much of the route is actually outside the district, in the first place.  On top of that, the bulk of the travel mileage is highway mileage, the kind that normally nets the higher rate.  So if you billed it out that way, the member would actually be taking a substantive hit in the bottom line, especially considering that this is not a once-in-a-while occurrence.

Then there's the mounds of paperwork and time consumed tracking travel and applying the rates.  It doesn't sound like much but when the guy is racking up the kind of mileage Langdon racked up, the paperwork starts to mount.

Not surprising therefore, that the people in the legislature worked out a simple way of averaging out a complex case. Strip away the Telegram's speculation in this case and one can easily see the fictitious midpoint as nothing more than a way of avoiding the intricacies of a reimbursement scheme that really didn't work well for a particular case.

The arrangement made it easier to fill out the claims and to get reimbursed.  While there might have been a loss on some claims and a gain on others, over time the thing averaged out.  It may not be perfect but it is practical.

And, while, theoretically Langdon may have pocketed a bit of extra cash, odds are pretty good he didn't. you see, the 16 large the telly is talking about is their entirely supposed, theoretical, possible extra cash based on a very simplistic calculation.  in making the allegations against Langdon, the Telly falls into the trap of Noseworthiness. 

That is, the Telegram makes claims without checking them out first.

The difference, counting the 262 trips he claimed at 1,800 km, is 65,000 km - and at the lowest mileage rate he could claim, it amounted to more than $16,000, tax-free, paid out for travel that could at best be described as "theoretical."

The travel isn't theoretical. The Telegram's story and editorial are.  They didn't check. And they certainly didn't check the travel before and after the averaging scheme was put in place to see if the whole thing actually does work out. The level of detail in either the story or the editorial doesn't back up the suppositions made about Langdon's claims.

The Telegram editorialists are accusing Langdon of committing fraud, of claiming for travel he didn't take.  It's a criminal offence, regardless of how much money is involved. Yet, there isn't a shred of evidence to substantiate the claim made by the Telegram.

Landgon should hire a good lawyer and sue. He'd likely win a tidy sum, considerably more than the amount the telly is accusing him of pocketing.  If Noseworthy doesn't hold some form of parliamentary immunity, there are people who should be suing his sorry-assed accounting as well for the same thing.

What the Telegram has done here is as bad as claiming that members of the opposition are getting double and triple extra pay only to find out that - had the newspaper bothered to check the facts - the whole story was bogus. In the meantime, examples of far more dubious spending in the legislature go, thus far, entirely unexplored.

A double standard?

Maybe.

But it certainly is a story that has plenty of Noseworthiness.

It smells.

-srbp-