Finance minister Jerome Kennedy’s not alone.
He’s not alone on a lot of things, but in this case, we refer to his lack of willingness to read the documents relevant to an issue and to understand the plain English meaning of them.
Jerome’s already been poked a bit both here and at the Telegram over his apparent ignorance of the role of the Clerk of the House of Assembly.
But there’s more ignorance, and that has to do with one of the issues the House of Assembly Management Commission discussed at its May 13 meeting.
They were talking about recreating the financial statements of the legislature for Fiscal Years 1999 and 2000. The issue is whether or not to pay an outside audit firm to rebuild the House accounts for those two years and then audit them.
Auditor General John Noseworthy believes this work would be for naught since many of the records are missing and there is no guarantee the accounts would be accurate. He noted in correspondence dating back to 2007 that his reviews would be sufficient to meet the legislative requirement the management commission is looking at in trying to have this work done. There’s an estimate under discussion of hiring an outside audit firm at a cost of over $600,000 to do the work.
Jerome thinks the work ought to be done.
Without going into all the details, he’s right.
The work ought to have been done and it should have been done by the Auditor General under the task assigned to him by cabinet in 2006. The only problem is that it isn’t clear the work was done.
In the summer of 2006, cabinet directed the Auditor General to do two things as a result of the House of Assembly scandal.
First, he was directed to go back to 1989 to find any other examples of overspending up to 2004. He did that and apparently found nothing beyond what he’d already reported. Note that he didn’t look in detail at the two years up to 2006 when the allowances account was overspent by about $1.0 million and the budget estimates presented in the House were known to be wrong.
Second, the Auditor General was directed to conduct “annual audits of the accounts of the House of Assembly from fiscal years 1999/2000 to 2003/2004.”
So where are those audits?
Good question, since they’ve never been made public. In fact, there’s no public sign that component of the order was ever done even though the Auditor General got extra money and staff in order to do the work.
What we got instead was a report that discussed some inappropriate spending from 1989 to 2005. We can say “some” inappropriate spending since Noseworthy never went into enough detail to determine where all the cash actually went or if people misdirected money even if they didn’t exceed their allowance totals.
For example, Noseworthy never reported at all – apparently never even noticed – how much money was directed to partisan purposes even for a member now known to have funded party work out of his allowances. There was a glaringly obvious breach of the Elections Act in there but it went unreported until the Ed Byrne trial.
If Noseworthy didn’t do that for one glaring example, then we have to wonder just exactly how much of a look his team of auditors actually gave any of their reports. But that’s a digression.
The key point to bear in mind is that the Auditor General himself was tasked with producing detailed audits for 1999 up to 2004. That’s irrespective of whether or not there was an audit by a private firm.
On top of that, there’s no sign Noseworthy and his team ever did the work they were tasked with by cabinet in 2006.
So what exactly is the House of Assembly Management Commission doing arguing about spending public money to recreate what the Auditor General already got paid to do?
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