Last week, the Union of B.C. Municipalities released its report on the operations of B.C.’s Auditor General for Local Government.
It paints a less than flattering picture of the office — no surprise given that the UBCM was hardly a fan of the concept in the first place.
The report’s findings are based on a survey of 17 communities that had contact with the auditor general, and they didn’t pull any punches in their observations: “uninformed, obvious confusion, disarray, fails to meet deadlines, disorganized, mishandles information.”
But there is something puzzling about the report. You’re left with the impression the auditor general idea happened in a vacuum.
From the report: “While it may be possible to renew the operational approach of the AGLG to better serve local governments, it is unlikely this will be achieved without substantive consultation.”
Consultation certainly wasn’t lacking when the auditor general developed its annual service plans in 2013.
The UBCM executive met B.C.’s first auditor general for local government, Basia Ruta, at its January 2013 meeting, just a week after she was appointed to the job. They met again in February and in March at the UBCM’s regional district CAO/chairs meeting.
The auditor general held a two-day strategic planning workshop that April with key stakeholders, including the UBCM, local government associations and performance audit experts.
There was a one-day performance audit planning workshop with senior staff from 20 local governments, which was followed by an online audit planning survey sent to every single chief administrative officer in the province.
One of the themes was emergency management and protective services, and, if the UBCM survey is any indication, that one hit a nerve. One community with RCMP policing commented that since it had very little discretion over the terms of its policing contract, “the AGLG is not quite sure how to assess our situation.”
Another claimed that the “auditors appeared to have very little background information regarding municipal police unit agreements.”
If policing was going to be so problematic, why didn’t someone catch it earlier on in the consultations before it was assigned as an audit topic?
When asked to comment on the value of the three reports publicly available during the survey, only two of the 17 agreed they provided “valuable information that will contribute to the improvement of their operations.”
Dermod Travis is the executive director of Integrity B.C., www.integritybc.ca.
