How Toronto got burned by fire inspection contracts
When the city of Toronto awarded a contract in 2015 to inspect the fire safety of some of its most public buildings, a city safety manager tried to have a meeting with Dave Daniels, the president of York Fire Protection, who had signed the contract. Seems reasonable enough.
The problem was that he didn’t exist. The photo of him on the company website was a stock photo.
His biography and professional accomplishments (“senior fire engineer”) had been made up. He was, according to a report by city auditor general Beverly Romeo-Beehler that comes before city council this week, a “fake person.”
Strange. And it wasn’t the first time it had happened. In 2011, the city contract for similar fire code inspection work was awarded to Advance Fire Control, and was signed by David Williams. But the manager supervising the contract for the city never met him — he was always out of the office.
At one point, the city employee mused to a colleague that he thought Williams was “fictitious.” He was right. Williams too, the auditor reports, was a “fake person.”
The auditor confirmed this — after compiling a thick file of evidence including forensic handwriting analysis and professional records searches, and finally “after intense questioning, under oath” — with Rauf Ahmad, the actual owner of both companies. After initially denying it, he admitted both names — and at least four others he has used in his dealings with the city — are “AKAs,” or pseudonyms.
Strange. But the auditor’s report just gets stranger — stranger than fictional company owners, stranger than fiction in some places — and more disturbing. In its 144 pages, Romeo-Beehler details the bizarre history of the city’s dealing with Ahmad’s companies. On almost every page there’s something that makes you gasp and shake your head.
If you have a taste for the outrageous, it’s worth reading the whole thing. I found myself reading sections out loud in disbelief to whoever was around. I was often tempted to laugh in exasperation. But the stakes are too high to laugh.
The implications are too disturbing. These contracts with Ahmad’s companies, worth more than $900,000 between 2010 and 2017, dealt with ensuring the fire safety of many of Toronto’s most important and prominent buildings. City hall, Union Station, Exhibition Place, police headquarters, fire stations themselves, among many others. Lives were at stake.
Romeo-Beehler found that, in many cases, there was no way for the city to tell if work had actually been done, or had been done properly.
My colleague Gilbert Ngabo covered this when the auditor’s report was released earlier this month, but there’s no way a news story or column could detail the entire scope of the chaos and potential danger it represents.
York Fire Protection did not return repeated calls for comment from Ahmad or another representative to the Star in early July, and did not return calls and email from the Star on Friday.
Even a partial list of the problems Romeo-Beehler investigated can spin your head:
á Invoicing was sloppy and subject to tampering because of the format used, and neither the city nor the companies could provide required paperwork to prove invoices were legitimate.
á In some cases, the invoices had obvious signs of inaccuracy, such as inspecting sprinkler systems in places that had no sprinkler systems, or showing a single inspector was at three different locations at the same time.
á The signatures of inspectors on work reports were sometimes forged or copied electronically, and often no city staff member had signed off that the work had been completed. In some cases where staff had signed off, the auditor reports, “the signatures on the service orders are not their signatures.”
á As a result of the auditor general’s investigation, the fire chief investigated the companies’ work at private buildings, resulting in 58 fire code charges.
á At the request of the auditor general, the fire department inspected 12 city-owned buildings to ensure they were in compliance with the fire code. All but one were found to have deficiencies — including Union Station, city hall, Old City Hall and a city-run daycare.
Almost as concerning as the potential safety problems is how this kind of behaviour was allowed to continue for years, with the companies continuing to be paid and awarded new contracts. The auditor’s investigation shows supervisors were aware of many of the problems at almost every stage of the contract — communicating internally and with the companies to demand invoicing and other practices be fixed. Yet the companies were repeatedly awarded new contracts to do the same work. In fact, a company run by Ahmad was almost awarded a contract this past May, just as the auditor’s investigation was set to be released and after Ahmad and his company were charged by the fire department.
Here’s a chunk of an interview by the auditor general with a manager from the city about invoices that were in dispute for safety reasons (emphasis added by the auditor general in her report):
AG: “… You paid (the invoices)? But these were in dispute at the time, were they not?” Manager: “That’s correct.” AG: “Did (you) go back and make sure that the work was done?” Manager: “No.” AG: “… it’s in dispute because … the work might not be done?”
Manager: “Or the reports were inaccurate. Sometimes the reports had showed more emergency lighting that there was, sometimes it showed less … they just weren’t accurate.”
AG: “… So there is a possibility that the work wasn't done?” Manager: “Yeah.” AG: “And (you) didn't go back to check that?” Manager: “No.” When the auditor general first received a complaint about the fire service contracts and began her investigation, she contacted the city’s facilities management division to ask them to look over the paperwork. The city department supervising these contracts, she writes, “concluded there was no support for the allegations” and “no indication of any mishandling.”
This response came despite the fact that, the auditor general concluded, “management was aware, over an extended period of time through staff complaints, that these vendors had serious billing irregularities and unsatisfactory performance relating to inspections, including submitting inspections reports and service orders without customer and/or vendor signatures, billing for work not completed and submitting duplicate invoices.”
She concludes, “despite mounting evidence against this vendor, and throughout this investigation, management insisted the work was essentially completed and there was a need to trust the vendor.”
After that, how can we trust the city’s management of contracts like these? They are dealing not only with public money, but with a contract meant to ensure the safety of everyone who uses some of our most important public buildings.
When the report was released, Mayor John Tory used the word “disgrace” to describe the staff’s lack of co-operation with the auditor general. He decried the lack of due diligence in supervising the contracts. He said city council would consider discipline, “including dismissal.” That’s a start. The auditor general includes 17 recommendations on how to proceed from there.