MK Braaten watched Scott Brison on Question Period this morning. So did I. Unlike me, though, he actually took him up on his offer to look at the Liberal Party audits posted on their website. Here’s just a teaser;
I have analyzed the so called ‘audits’ that the firms have recently performed on the Liberals books. The Liberals hired public accounting firms PriceWaterHouseCooopers and Deloitte to conduct these engagements. As a result of analyzing these statements what I found is quite interesting. The engagements focused on the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party’s finances and also the Federal Liberals finances. Deloitte was in charge of the Quebec wing and PWC conducted the engagement on the federal Liberal party’s finances. In fact, these engagements are not audits but simply an analysis of parts of the Liberals finances that they asked the firm to analyze.
[…]
The nature of this engagement is so the Liberal party of Canada can tell Canadians that it has had its books ‘audited’ by an external auditor. The recent sponsorship scandal has been linked to the Liberal party and its finances. However, in this engagement report, Deloitte writes that the report only analyses encashed contributions from – and disbursements made to advertising and communications agencies. More specifically, this engagement is only analyzing the parts of the Liberals finances that the Liberals asked them to analyze at the discretion of the party,and nothing more. By using the accounting data provided by the Liberals, Deloitte only compared the payments made and received in the books to the amounts deposited and removed from the bank accounts that they were given access to by the Liberal party. Likewise, the report only analyzes the information of four bank accounts, at a single bank, which were provided at the discretion of the Quebec wing.
He’s been kind enough to flesh out the piece with with the donation figures to registered political parties by the Samson Belair/ Deloitte & Touche folks.
A must read, and a fabulous tip if you’re a hungry journalist.
Dude is on a tear! This is a huge tip for the journos who don’t know the differences between the various forms of “audits”. Keep digging and spreading the word.
Wow, can you say “cover up”? This is the scandal that keeps on giving.
I saw a brief clip of that as well. While I didn’t go into the books, I thought how rediculous such a claim was given the “under the table” (actually “on the table in an envelope”) transactions that would be off the books. The level of Liberal arrogance at this point to suggest that a two-bit number review should outwiegh hours and hours of detailed testimony with corroborating documents.
I’m not holding my breath that the MSM is going to call him on this. That’s why it’s all the more important for bloggers to fill in the void.
One more thought,
I wonder what the executives at Deloitte & Touche are thinking about having the world told that they effectively gave the Liberals the “thumbs up.”
Duffy asked if the audit sowed that no dirty money had gone to the Liberal party.
All Brison said was, that the “audit” showed all entries matched up, that money said to be going in went in.
In other words, Scotty didnt answer the question. He said nothing about source. For example, the 100,000 that Brault said he gave in cash could have gone into the party and this statement would still be true, assuming there was a matching entry. But of course Brault never claimed in other places that he made the contribution, so it is also a true statement if the money never went into that account. It is a circular argument.
End of the day, there needs to be an independent audit of all of the books. As wel, if there is ever an election soon, the moment the Liberals lose the Conservatives should have a court order ready to demand that no documents be shredded.
This is bigger than people suspect. They just need to find the definitive link to the English part of the Liberal party and the whole thing goes up in a puff of smoke.
What did Deep throat say….”follow the money”