Where there’s smoke ...

Missing fire safety reports in Toronto

The City of Toronto’s records in its Facilities Management division, where fake fire inspectors regularly won contracts to make sure municipal buildings were safe, are so bad that Toronto Police can’t even launch a fraud investigation.

Last Friday, city auditorgeneral Beverly RomeoBeehler, who blew the whistle on potential wrongdoing by a vendor and gross mismanagement by the city, told the audit committee that there is “definitely high risk for fraud” but pointed out that without good records and witnesses, it would be difficult to prove.

“Can the police prove it?” she asked, rhetorically. “We’ve been in contact with them all along.”

Monday, National Post confirmed that the documentation kept by Facilities Management is so poor police can’t even start a probe.

The schemozzle in the department came to light when Romeo-beehler received serious allegations about a trio of companies — York Fire Protection, Advance Fire Control and Advanced Detection Technologies Corp. — which had been doing business with the city for about a decade.

The same man, Rauf Ahmad, is the “directing mind” behind all three.

The allegations included double-billing, overcharging for work not done, phoney double-bidding for city contracts, the company using multiple false identities (including employees who would change shirts, now wearing one with a York logo and then one with the Advance Fire logo, depending on where they were working), shifting company names and suspect addresses (the headquarters for one of Ahmad’s companies was a Birchmount Road mosque) and its long history of poor performance and shoddy work for the city somehow failing to prevent it getting new or even enriched contracts.

As city councillor Josh Matlow said at the Friday meeting, “…it is almost like one of those weird Netflix shows where you just can’t believe this mystery that’s being put together and fake names and fake dates where companies were started and people coming back with different shirts — it’s absurd.

“If somebody actually wrote a script like that, they’d probably get laughed out the door — like you couldn’t believe it.

“Yet, it happened,” Matlow said.

“And the fact that this absurdity was then by the City of Toronto allowed to then turn into a contract where people got tax dollars and life safety was potentially put at risk, is beyond disbelief.”

The AG passed the original complaint to Josie Scioli, at that time the chief corporate officer responsible for Facilities Management, for what’s called a “first line assessment” about whether there was any merit to the allegations.

Scioli and senior officials concluded there was no support for the allegations, and told Romeo-beehler “no invoices were paid unless an inspection report is provided by York and matched with their invoice.” This is known as a three-way matching process.

In fact, the AG found, the inspection report audit trail “is missing.”

As she told the committee, “Invoicing was an absolute mess.”

While this would raise a red flag in any municipal department because of the potential for fraud, with “life safety systems” — it means fire and smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, sprinklers and emergency lighting — it also raises the potential for loss of life, and thus is critically important.

Only a documented inspection trail — that, for instance, the fire alarms in any given building were properly inspected and tested at the necessary intervals mandated by the fire code—demonstrates that the building is actually safe.

The city auditor-general and the forensic accountants she hired to help her could find full or partial documentation for only 52 per cent of the invoices they sampled.

The reports that existed — some whole reports were missing — were inaccurate and on some, signatures for both vendor and city officials, were cut and pasted.

Shockingly, by February of this year, by which time Scioli was a Deputy City Manager, Deputy Fire Chief Jim Jessop, who was working with Romeo-beehler on the investigation and being stalled on getting the documents he needed, urged Scioli in writing to notify the AG “of this potential wrongdoing.”

Jessop offered to tell her himself if Scioli preferred.

The AG was never told. She learned of Jessop’s recommendation only by the by, as her investigation was wrapping up.

And when she asked to meet with Facilities Management managers this spring, senior management first sent them a reminder, before the meeting, that the department follows the three-way matching process — in other words, witnesses, remember your damn lines!

And there, last Friday, was the same Josie Scioli, testifying before the audit committee, issuing the same sort of preposterous pap she and the senior managers had been feeding the AG all along.

“Your buildings are safe,” she told the committee, “but the documentation is not what it should be.”

Even now, Scioli et al do not get it: You cannot say a building is safe where the inspection trail is non-existent or deeply flawed. Both Romeo-beehler and Jessop were forced to contradict her.

Astonishingly, the committee is now asking city council to give Scioli as much as $650,000 to hire a third-party vendor to conduct a fire and life safety audit of city facilities.

Fox, meet henhouse.