Councillor fully repaid ineligible expenses: report
Magliocca inappropriately expensed more than $9,000, audit discovered
More than a year after Coun. Joe Magliocca's spending touched off a firestorm around council expense oversight, a new city report says the Ward 2 councillor's ineligible expenses are fully repaid.
Magliocca began reimbursing the city last January after Postmedia revealed he had expensed up to three times as much as his fellow council members to attend the 2019 Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference in Quebec City. The situation got more complicated as 10 people listed on his receipts for meals and drinks at the event said they hadn't actually been hosted by Magliocca.
He was Calgary's representative on the FCM board at the time, a role he held between 2017 and 2019 and which required him to travel for meetings and conferences with other officials.
At first, the councillor repaid all alcohol and hosting costs from the FCM conference. By late February of 2020, he said that “upon reflection” he would repay all alcohol-related expenses since the start of the current council term, in 2017.
An independent forensic audit of his spending later determined that he inappropriately expensed $5,657 in hotel costs, meals and hosting since 2017. But some additional hosting costs where listed attendees couldn't be reached were left in question, as well as costs for numerous flight upgrades — an ineligible expense under council policy unless economy fares are unavailable.
After looking into those costs further, city officials say they identified an additional $3,762.88 in ineligible expenses, factoring in an overpayment Magliocca made on the previous amount.
According to the report, which council's finance committee will review Monday, the city received a cheque for that amount on March 11, “resolving all outstanding financial issues related to the investigation.”
The final amount Magliocca repaid includes a little more than $1,000 in ineligible hosting expenses and about $2,700 in airfare costs.
In total, Magliocca inappropriately expensed more than $9,000 since the last election, according to the independent audit and subsequent city investigation. The number has changed slightly since a report on his hosting costs earlier this year.
Postmedia contacted Magliocca for comment Friday, but he hasn't yet responded. The last time the councillor addressed his expenses was in October, after council's finance committee agreed he should repay the difference between seven upgraded airline seats and the average airfare at the time.
He has previously said he always intended to follow council policy and any discrepancies were “in error.”
Council voted last year to bar Magliocca from expensing business travel for the rest of his term. The expense audit was also referred to police and RCMP are investigating.
The Ward 2 councillor was directed to publicly apologize, but he hasn't done so since the external audit was released.
City officials are currently working to clarify and fix councillor expense policies after the independent audit found gaps, conflicting wording and grey areas. Some councillor expenses, including travel, are also not currently publicly available as part of the typical ward budget disclosure.
Friday's report says the city CFO will create a plan to publicly release that spending for council members and administration, dating back to the start of the current council term.