SENATE MINDSET CREATED HURDLE
Auditor general Michael Ferguson faced obstinance and resistance from some members of the senate en route to compiling his scathing review that found 30 senators with problematic spending claims. Here is a look at Ferguson’s two- year journey leading to t
EGOS AND ATTITUDES
One senator refused to cooperate with auditors until the very last minute. Ferguson said Wednesday the senator finally relinquished and provided access to documents auditors had been seeking for months.
The explanation? “Ego got in the way,” Ferguson said.
He would not identify the senator. But he said the intransigence spoke volumes about the attitudes he and his auditors encountered over the two years it took to complete the report.
“That illustrates again how deeply rooted — at least for some senators — ( was) the feeling that they didn’t have to be answerable for their expenses.”
Ferguson’s report described a culture of entitlement in which some senators opted for more expensive options when cheaper choices were available. There were hockey games, fishing trips, anniversaries and funerals that Ferguson found had nothing to do with Senate business.
He said senators had not been transparent about their expenses and were able to justify a claim simply by telling Senate administration it was for “parliamentary business.”
He said in some cases senators could have sought extra material to support their claims, but didn’t do so before the audit was released.
TIME AND MONEY
Ferguson said the $ 23.6- million price tag for his audit was not out of the ordinary for his office.
Nor did it cost extra cash to conduct the sweeping two- year probe, which he said was paid for within the confines of his budget.
He said the costs would have been incurred regardless of what the auditors were working on, such as salaries, utilities and office space. Those expenses, known as “allocated costs,” account for about half the $ 23.6- million total.
That means the direct cost of the audit was $ 11 million to $ 12 million.
“That really represents the opportunity costs,” Ferguson said. “Those are the auditors that could have been doing something different.”
On average, Ferguson said, auditors spent about 1,000 hours on each senator under review.
He also said his office underestimated how much time each file would take, but “we ended up having to do all of the audit within our regular office budget.”
Ferguson has come under criticism for the cost of the audit, given that his work identified just $ 991,917 worth of wrongful claims out of 80,000 transactions over the two- year span of the audit.
“It’s easy to add up what we found and to look at the cost and do that strict comparison, but I think there’s a lot more behind that to get to understanding," Ferguson said.
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Ferguson’s report flagged the cases of five current and former senators who claimed ineligible living expenses by declaring their primary residence was outside Ottawa when, in fact, they spent most of their time in the capital.
The same issue is at the heart of the criminal trial for suspended Sen. Mike Duffy, who declared his primary residence in Prince Edward Island and claimed thousands of dollars of living expenses while in Ottawa — despite having lived in the capital for decades.
The crux of the matter is what is considered a senator’s “primary residence.” There doesn’t seem to be a clear- cut definition of primary residence or list of requirements for meeting the standard. The auditor general used a Senate principle for primary residence in declaring that five senators had inappropriately claimed living expenses while staying in their main residences in Ottawa.
“If a senator resides primarily in the National Capital Region, he or she should not be claiming living expenses for the National Capital Region,” Ferguson said.