Auditor General out with report
Posted Feb 12, 2013 11:58 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The province’s auditor general is out with his February 2013 report and lists 28 recommendations and repeated five older ones where progress wasn’t up to snuff.
Merwan Saher is calling on Alberta Health Services to establish tighter controls over it’s expense claims and in complying with policies.
In the last year, he found cases of A-H-S employees buying unauthorized items, taking thousand-dollar plane rides from Edmonton to Calgary, and in one case charging taxpayers to fly their own private plane.
He found oversight was lacking in 100-million dollars worth of expense spending at A-H-S.
Saher also says the province didn’t break its own rules by delivering a bare-bones first-quarter budget update last summer.
Saher says the Government Accountability Act is written so broadly either a brief update or a detailed one could be acceptable.
Saher investigated after Finance Minister Doug Horner delivered the first update on the 2011-12 budget last August without basics such as a balance sheet.
It’s when Albertans first learned that a projected deficit for this year would be in the range of $3 billion more than three times what was originally predicted.
Opponents suggested the update was nothing more than a brochure and violated Alberta’s law to keep citizens informed on what’s happening with their money.
Saher says the government provided more details three months later in its second-quarter update, but still should have included a forecast of revenues and expenses.
