AG will investigate document leak: Brickell
Standard story detailed 40 NPCA 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 the agency’s practices and calls from Niagara municipalities for an audit.
Sandy Annunziata, chair of the 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. “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.
Lysyk spent the morning Wednesday at NPCA’s Ball’s Falls centre giving the board a previously scheduled, closed-door 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.”
NPCA chief administrative officer Mark Brickell addressed The Standard story during his remarks at the 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.”