Former N.L. auditor untangling senators’ expenses
Senate must restore accountability: Marshall
Sen. Elizabeth Marshall just can’t stop auditing things. After serving as Newfoundland and Labrador auditor general, and then serving on the audit committee during her time in the House of Assembly, she was recently responsible for auditing the expenses of Sens. Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau.
And as the chairwoman of the Senate audit committee, Marshall is now responsible for working with Michael Ferguson, the Auditor General of Canada, to do a comprehensive audit of the Senate as a whole.
As a former auditor general and sitting senator, Marshall appears to be playing an increasingly central role in untangling the mess of improper spending claims involving taxpayer money.
As the Senate expense scandal unfolds, the audits just keep coming.
At one point, not too long ago, when she was asked to look at the expenses of Brazeau, Marshall thought she could handle it herself.
“We started out with just Sen. Brazeau, and I actually started doing the audit work myself with the internal auditor for the Senate. Once I got into it, it was too big a job. It wasn’t something I could do myself because of the volume of transactions,” she said.
Volume of work too great
“We started to the actual audit work — myself and the internal auditor — and we were into details, eh? But I’m also the Conservative whip in the Senate, so I have other things to do. I just couldn’t. The volume was such I just couldn’t do it.”
Things have unfolded since then, including revelations that Sen. Mike Duffy claimed more than $90,000 worth of expenses that he wasn’t entitled to, and Nigel Wright, the prime minister’s then-chief of staff, wrote him a cheque to cover the money.
That aspect of the scandal is now the subject of a police investigation.
As things have snowballed in recent months, Ferguson was brought in, and now as chairwoman of the audit committee, Marshall is working closely with him on the full audit of the Senate.
Hard to know the outcome
In a June meeting with the Senate Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration, Ferguson said it’s tough to say what exactly the final product will look like, or when it’ll be done.
“At this point it is virtually impossible to say how long each component will take,” he said, “but what I can say is that it is our intention to get the staff assigned to this piece of work as quickly as possible and get it started as quickly as pos-
We started out with just Sen. Brazeau, and I actually started doing the audit work myself with the internal auditor for the Senate. Once I got into it, it was too big a job. Sen. Elizabeth Marshall
sible.”
Marshall pointed out that this isn’t the first audit of the Senate done by the Auditor General of Canada.
“Actually, the federal auditor general conducted an audit of the Senate a couple years ago, and the report was issued last year. Actually, the report was positive. I mean, based on my experience as an auditor and now I was receiving an audit from the federal auditor general, I was pleased,” she said.
“I don’t see the work that the auditor general did last year any different than the work I did when I was auditor general in Newfoundland.”
As for why the previous auditor general review didn’t pick up improper spending by Duffy and other senators, Marshall said that’s something that the auditor general would have to answer.
Ultimately, she said, the audit will help, but eventually she thinks that the Senate needs to do more to restore confidence and accountability.
“I think that other things will need to happen also,” she said.
“I think that the audit by the auditor general will be a big help and will have a big impact, but there’s other things that the senate itself has to do, so I would expect that there are a number of things that have to happen in order to restore confidence.”