While everyone may have been on holidays when this one broke, here's a Bond Paper from August that notes the House of Assembly overspent members' allowances by over half a million dollars in each of fiscal years 2004 and 2005.
For those who remember, that's two fiscal years after Auditor General John Noseworthy originally contended problems with the House accounts were fixed. It's also considerably more than the amounts Noseworthy alleges were paid to two sitting members of the House during those years.
On top of that, Bond Papers pointed out in August that for two successive budgets, finance minister Loyola Sullivan misreported House of Assembly spending during his term as finance minister. The financial statement released in August also contained columns of figures that were presented in a way that suggested they had previously been released. As such, the presentation diverted attention from the misrepresentations in the spring budgets.
The figures hadn't been made public at all.
The finance minister knew or should have known the correct figures on actual spending. Those figures come from the Comptroller General's office which issues cheques for all departments and the House of Assembly. If accounts were overspent, the Comptroller General caught it or should have caught it and reported it to his boss, Loyola Sullivan.
Has anyone asked Loyola Sullivan why his Estimates numbers for the House of Assembly were wrong two years in a row?
Has anyone asked Auditor General John Noseworthy to explain the discrepancy between his figures and the Comptroller General's numbers?
Incidentally, Noseworthy audits and approves the Public Accounts statements normally published every year in November. So where are the audited public accounts for 2005?
The Financial Administration Act gives Loyola and John until February 1 to produce them, but surely the figures aren't so complex they have to be postponed, especially since Sullivan was able to release what amounts to Volume III of the Public Accounts back in August.
