Watchdog urges MPs to let him look at their books

Audit on members’ spending vital to accountability, AG says

OTTAWA— Auditor general Michael Ferguson is openly urging MPs to invite him to look at their books.

“I think what is necessary is that the House of Commons make sure that they have the appropriate levels of transparency and objectivity, the same types of things that we are recommending to the Senate,” Ferguson said in an interview with the Star. “We’re willing to play a role in that.” A Commons audit would be a “huge undertaking,” he conceded, but could be confined to a shorter period of spending, random samples of claims or narrowed in other ways. He said an independent audit function is a vital aspect of accountability to the public.

“Any time you have a situation of a group of people making decisions about that same group of people, it’s open to accusations of not being objective, not being independent, whether it’s actually functioning that way or not.”

But many senators are furious with Ferguson’s opinion on how they should be held to account, saying he invented new rules or tests to judge them by.

Several complained they never had to prove how much time they spent at a “primary residence” outside Ottawa in order to be able to claim up to $22,000 a year for “secondary residence” living costs and per diems while in Ottawa. The Mike Duffy fraud trial has heard there was no time requirement under Senate rules.

But Ferguson rejected those complaints. He said his analysis was based on existing principles in the Senate’s administrative rules and on the 2013 reports of the Senate’s powerful internal economy committee on the cases of Mac Harb, Patrick Brazeau, Pamela Wallin and Duffy.

He said the committee was clear: “There’s no ambiguity about it — if a senator is residing in the national capital region they should not be claiming those expenses while they’re in the national capital region.”

Same with travel claims, said Fergu- son: the onus is on the senator to show the main reason for the travel is Senate business, not personal or private interests.

Ferguson said his auditors believed that if “there was a substantive business reason for going there, then we would have accepted the travel there as being for parliamentary business. It wouldn’t have mattered if they then tacked on a personal vacation or a personal trip as long as there was nothing charged to the Senate for that personal component.

“But if we felt that the evidence was really convincing us that this was a personal trip but they tried to add on something to make it look like there was a business component to it, which really was not substantive, then we said no, that was a personal trip, it shouldn’t have been charged.”

Travel to attend board meetings was a no-go, says Ferguson.

He says the Senate should not be expected to cover travel to attend board meetings, saying a board member has a “fiduciary duty” to work on the “operation and good running of that organization,” and therefore is “not on Senate business.”

“We’re not passing any judgment — that’s good work, that’s important work, but it’s not Senate business, that’s board business . . . It’s not personal, but I would refer to it as their private interest.”

He drew a distinction between attending board meetings and simply raising awareness for good causes, which he said may qualify as Senate business.

The audit found some Senate contracting irregularities, such as one senator who split over two fiscal years the payments for contract work that was completed in one fiscal year, or the two senators who filed identical claims for the same day’s work by the same contractor.