City disclosing expenses on a quarterly basis in 2017

Summersiders can expect a quarterly update on councillor and mayoral expenses thanks to a change in the way the city’s finance department sorts the data.

Rob Philpott, the chief financial officer for the city, said the current system being used is time consuming.

“It’s why more recent finances haven’t been published. Normally our commitment has been to post them on a quarterly basis,” said Philpott. The method involves breaking down councillors’ expenses by date, the event and then offers details like hotel costs, meals, transportation and various other things.

“This information has to be extracted manually from our accounting system. The expenses are summarized by event but we have to manually review each event to identify the specific cost.” “Unfortunately the way we had set it up initially, maybe two and a half years ago, we wanted to be able to provide as much information as possible, but in doing that, it does take time to extract and compile the information.”

But that’s about to change. “Now we’re going to move to a new method of reporting this information which won’t require as much time to gather the information and therefore we can post the information quicker.

“The new method will include the total cost to attend the event in question, which is the type of method that is used in disclosing the expenses of elected officials both with the province and the City of Charlottetown.”

Philpott expects that by mid April all of 2016’s expenses to be posted online.

“Right now the expenses are posted on the mayor and council section of our website. “We are in the process of renewing our website which is set to launch in a few weeks, which will help with a more timely reporting of expenses and they’ll still be under the same section.

“But at any time any member of the public can contact the finance department if they have further questions,” Philpott added.