Culture of accountability at city hall finally taking hold: auditor

Edmonton’s city auditor added a silver lining to his latest critique involving an investigation into fraud allegations among city contractors that ended after time left the trail cold.

Auditor David Wiun was trying to investigate allegations city officials knew about and failed to report three years ago. But he said if the same thing were happening today, he’s convinced he would get the call on time.

“There are always going to be missteps and things that go awry,” Wiun told city council’s audit committee Thursday. But “one thing that has changed is (corporate leadership) is trying to deal with issues as they happen.

“I’m confident there will be ... fewer of these investigations and audit reports in the future.”

This audit involved eServices, a five-year attempt to move city applications and permitting processes online that went $5.4 million over budget and largely failed to deliver.

Wiun and his team found the information technology contractor supervising the project hired business partners to do the work without disclosing their relationship.

The city had little oversight to control the rates paid and hours charged to the project. But what the motives were and whether the people in charge personally benefited from decisions made, Wiun could not determine.

He approached police with his findings. They were not able to launch a meaningful investigation.

“The trail is cold,” he said. “Unfortunately, there was a lack of documentation.”

An audit report first released last week said eServices started in 2010 and was cancelled in 2015 when city administration learned about the conflict of interest allegations and did an internal investigation.

Council has been wrestling with how to ensure appropriate oversight and accountability for years, especially after several challenging audits.

Council blamed a culture of departmental silos and launched a massive city reorganization. Training was increased in contract management and conflict of interest provisions are now clearly spelled out in the employee code of conduct.

Officials now write formal project charters before authorizing a budget and create cross-departmental steering committees to ensure oversight, said chief financial officer Todd Burge. When this issue happened, “those just didn’t exist.”

The eServices effort was relaunched after the first failure, this time focused on finding off-theshelf solutions rather than writing code specifically for Edmonton.

With $6.5 million spent, officials have 13 types of applications online. Residents and businesses are choosing to use those online forms between 78 per cent and 100 per cent of the time, said city administration.

The next step is to allow businesses to submit commercial and industrial permit applications online.