Auditor General will look into leak: NPCA
Probe by The Standard details $1.5 million in contracts under review
Ontario’s Auditor General will investigate how The Standard came into possession of a leaked document from her audit of Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority, says the chair of NPCA.
A report in Wednesday’s Standard, based on the document, revealed more than $1.5 million in non-competitively procured NPCA contracts were under review and that many have incomplete or missing paperwork.
Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk was directed in October to investigate NPCA by the provincial public accounts committee following several years of complaints about NPCA’s practices and calls from Niagara municipalities for an audit.
Sandy Annunziata, chair of NPCA, told the board Lysyk assured him she will look into the leak.
“I would like to make a special comment on an article that came out in the newspaper yesterday,” Annunziata told the meeting Wednesday. “It was to do with a leaked Auditor General document. The document is owned by the Auditor General. We do not make comments on those kinds of issues. We don’t want to give any credibility or credence to how that document was circulated.
“I have been assured that the Auditor General takes these situations very seriously and will be investigating to see how one of their documents was leaked to the press. I just wanted to give that assurance. The Auditor General is fully aware of it. They will be embarking on their own investigation.”
Lysyk’s office couldn’t be reached to confirm Annunziata’s statement.
The document The Standard obtained provided responses from NPCA to some issues, but it is not the final Auditor General’s report — and does not contain final conclusions or recommendations.
Among the 40 items the provincial agency is investigating is $41,226 paid to Carmen D’Angelo — now Niagara Region chief administrative officer — for what the Auditor General document says was an “unidentifiable service.” It is also looking at $27,120 paid to a Mississauga law firm to help NPCA combat “nefarious sources” that had “impugned” its projects.
The document says many contracts had little to no documentation, and many of the contracts were sole-sourced without any form of competitive procurement.
A review of the document by The Standard found more than $1 million in non-competitively procured contracts dating back to 2012. The contracts covered such things as the printing of brochures, truck rentals, and planting and purchase of large trees. Among items under investigation was the contract with D’Angelo Performance Concepts in 2013.
D’Angelo was a member of the NPCA board and took a leave of absence from Oct. 17, 2013, to Feb. 17, 2014, the document says. During that period, he was hired by NPCA for a human resources restructuring project.
“There was no proposal made by Mr. D’Angelo identifying the work he would perform, no contract signed outlining the costs, no deliverables or expectations from the work he would perform, and no deliverables provided by Mr. D’Angelo indicating what work was performed in relations to the ‘HR restructuring,’” the document says.
D’Angelo was hired as NPCA chief administrative officer in May 2014 and maintained the position until October 2016. He did not respond to an interview request from The Standard.
Lysyk spent the morning Wednesday at NPCA’s Ball’s Falls centre giving the board a previously scheduled, closeddoor verbal report on her investigation. Her briefing took more than three hours to complete. The large windows that run the length of the public meeting room were covered with brown paper as she gave her update.
Asked in the parking lot about how the information was received and when her report will be released to the public, Lysyk declined to comment.
“We are still working through it,” she said. “I can talk with you — and I will talk with you — once we finalize the report and go through our normal protocols and clearance processes. I hope you can respect that.”
She said no date has been set for the public release of her audit report, which will be tabled at the provincial legislature.
NPCA chief administrative officer Mark Brickell also addressed The Standard story during his remarks at Wednesday’s board meeting.
“We are going to be working very closely with the Auditor General with respect to what happened with that leak,” he said. “However, and wherever, they came into possession of any document from the AG, the paper did so in a very unethical manner.
“It’s really quite shocking to see that this newspaper would be so reckless in the handling of such information. I’m going to respect the chair’s comments and not go beyond that other than we will work closely with the AG.
“It has been a complete disservice to the AG, the NPCA staff and the people of the watershed, the reckless handling of that information,” Brickell said.