Cash burns at sloppy health giant

Many threats can really scare a person these days. Things like environmental disaster, economic collapse, and 26,000 Alberta Health Services employees running around with expense accounts.

The auditor general’s latest report reveals that shocking fact and many more. The document is revelatory about the enormous size, gargantuan appetite and sloppy practices of Alberta’s cash-burning health behemoth.

One AHS employee — we don’t know who — has a credit card spending limit of $900,000. I really want lunch with that person.

In 17 months, AHS paid $100 million in expense claims. Even A-G Merwan Saher, used to big numbers, confessed to being “quite taken aback at how large the sum was.”

(“Taken aback” is accountant talk for “Holy s---!”)

Most of the claims came from 26,000 of the 100,000 AHS employees, an expensing army larger than the population of seven Alberta cities.

In one case, Saher laconically reports, “a person providing services in a town flew their own plane instead of taking a commercial flight.”

And then, the person claimed the expense. AHS had some difficulty calculating the benefit.

In the highest single claim, AHS paid $116,390 for a realtor’s commission expensed by an employee.

The standard limit on corporate credit cards (which AHS calls “purchasing cards”) is $10,000 a month or $120,000 a year.

Thirteen people had limits ranging from $180,000 up to that $900,000 whopper.

The ill-recorded expenses seem to flow at all levels, from the top to the care level.

Here’s a short list of items AHS employees and agencies bought with their credit cards:

Toys, books, and video games; a set of Flames seasons tickets for two years; 550 tickets for the Stampede; 40 Grandstand Show passes and 10 rodeo tickets.

Why would a health authority buy these things?

Saher, always fair-minded, acknowledges that there can be legitimate reasons.

If a health worker bought a video game for some lonely disabled child in a care home, for instance, few of us would object.

Carewest says the hockey tickets were resold to care home residents. Again, it’s not a bad idea.

But Carewest hasn’t proven that the tickets were resold. Saher’s staff will hit the books to make sure there was “no net cost to Carewest except for the tickets for volunteers who accompanied residents.”

You get it; he’s on the lookout for staff members getting free tickets.

In nearly every case he mentions, AHS and its offspring can’t properly account for the expenses. AHS even pays some contracted companies for travel and other expenses as a fixed percentage of fees billed.

That’s a short route to boondoggle. If the company inflates its billing, then the expense payments go up in tandem.

Saher doesn’t like the look of this. “We can’t tell whether or not there is a valid business case,” he says.

“If AHS thought it was the most cost-effective for Albertans, they needed to make a much better justification in their records.”

All this, it seems to me, is part of the rampant spread of entitlement in management levels of Alberta’s publicly funded bodies.

Their interests are now diverging at light speed from the public interest. AHS, being the biggest, is probably fated to be the worst.

But the government doesn’t tackle AHS. It prefers to discredit the doctors, most of whom have to pay for their own expenses, benefits and pensions.