The accounting firm hired to audit the finances of the troubled Attawapiskat First Nation reserve in northern Ontario says there is little or no documentation for millions of dollars spent by the band, CBC News has learned.
The unreleased audit was intended to ensure that more than $100 million provided by the federal government to Attawapiskat between April 2005 and November 2011 was spent as it should have been.
CBC News has obtained a copy of the audit. The funding was intended for housing, sewage, education and other services.
In a letter dated Sept. 20, 2012, that was written by Deloitte to Chief Theresa Spence and copied to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, that auditing firm says that of 505 transactions reviewed, more than 400 lacked proper documentation.
[…]
Deloitte reported its finding to Spence in late August. It’s not known what she or the band council did in response to the findings.
I sense a blood clot coming on.
First things first – a statement from @justintrudeau MT @kady now we wait to see if #IdleNoMore begins to distance itself from Spence
— katewerk (@katewerk) January 7, 2013
There were 1,549 people living on the Attawapiskat reserve in 2011 per the census.
$100,000,000.00 works out to $64,557.78 for every man, woman and child on that reserve.
I’m speechless.
Chief Spence’s spokesman says the audit was “blown” (without foundation) and of course the usual, it was leaked now to discredit the “process.” Again there’s no explanation beyond “no comment” to how that is. What is clear is Spence and her people have discredited themselves without any help. She obviously knew an adverse report was coming – surely the auditors asked lots of questions to everyone involved in the “process.”
Her non-hunger strike is a stunt, has been from the start, and done now as a deflection tactic, but now has been exposed to the light of day. The old saw about how we already knew about this has also been used, as if that is relevant, though it amazes me that Justin, Paul Martin and others wasted political capital having anything to do with her when they surely knew this audit report was imminent. Are they that desperate for publicity?
I will say, though the whole story is yet to be told, that Spence and her gang are pikers at corruption compared to the Chretien Liberals, who have to this day still haven’t repaid the money they “misappropriated” from taxpayers.
It’s hard to see how the RCMP won’t be involved in this, that this is just administrative oversight, that the funds were still not misappropriated/misspent. Maybe, just maybe, if Spence does attend the native chiefs/PM meeting on Friday that she will be called big time about what is going on during her watch and that her stunts are hurting the cause – don’t bet the farm on this though.
No wonder the IdleforMore folks are “distancing” themselves from Spence, when before they were more than happy to hitch their wagon to her star. It’s wake up time for the native establishment – the government, the taxpayer and the rank in file natives should serve notice now the mismanagement and leadership by blame doesn’t cut it any more.
I know – I won’t bet the farm on that either. In fact I just heard on CTV Spence has given a press release that says, sigh, the audit is a discredited leaked document to well, discredit her and won’t deter her from her goals. Her goal now should be to find a really good criminal lawyer.
Joe blow indian who lives on a Reserve is often poor and unhappy. The present system of bad self governance in cahoots with the dependency creating framework of Federal laws and bureaucracies for “dealing with” indians is largely responsible.
Tubby Theresa is making things worse by being silly and making herself and her people objects of ridicule. As Kate said a couple of days ago, our indians need to integrate themselves with the rest of us Canadians and they can do that without being assimilated.
I think that the best thing that can happen is for events to get really Monty Python and so ridiculous that nobody, indians included, can stand it any more. That might open the door to fundamental changes that bring Reserve dwellers into mainstream Canadian society. If that means physically moving people from the Reserve to places where a real economy exists, that they can take part in as plain self determining individuals instead of being part of some damaged “community”, then so be it.
It’s crazy to waste the potential of any Canadians and the pudgy lady in the tent should be told that.
Apparent negligence is a common way to cover up theft of funds. It is obvious that a criminal investigation is in order that should start with putting the payees of all cheques on record as to what was sold to the reserve with the warning that they will be back to confirm proof. And suggest that the time to make deals to stay out of jail is today, not tomorrow. Maybe this is already happening.
dmorris: ” The B**** has known about the audit for 4 or 5 months!”
Hey, c’mon, dmorris, be fair: Chief Honey Boo Boo isn’t too bright. It took her and her “advisers” this long to figure out that a “hunger strike” with a teepee as a prop might take the heat off and get them off the hook.
Like I said, Chief Spends isn’t too bright — and didn’t take Ezra Levant and SunTV into account.
As for Paul Martin’s absolutely asinine remark about Spence’s being an inspiration, nothing’s changed with this guy. He’s a doofus, always looks like deer caught in the headlights. This remark reveals what a has-been he is. Martin as PM was just a cog in the Liberal-we-operate-within-a-culture-of-corruption Party.
“Who was it who said ‘If you are not a socialist (liberal) by the time you are 20, you have no heart. If you are still a socialist by the time you are 40, you have no brain.'”
Winston Churchill.
me thinks some in here are not aware of the type of hunger strike “chief big as a whale”is on she’s on a reduced wieght gain diet, mean she is not putting on the winter pounds as fast as she would be sitting in her office counting all that scammed money of hers!!!
“The Deloitte audit catalogues more than $109 million in spending over almost seven years, much of it poorly documented, undocumented, or questionable.”
This is taxpayer’s money and it shouldn’t take more than 24 hours to announce that there will be a forensic audit and a police investigation -Canadian taxpayers deserve nothing less and nothing should deflect from getting the job done. There should be no political divide on this, and Conservatives , Liberals , NDP and Green should all agree and demand there be no delays.
Makes Ezra’s obtaining copies of the invoice for the Zamboni all the more remarkable!
WOw…I’m floored that FINALLY, finally this is turning the way it must in fact be turned.!! Time to clear the air and time to end the Indian Act. Did these results comes as a surprise to ANYONE.?? I’ve been banging on this drum for over 30 years…and now feel damned well vindicated. This embezzlement of Funds from Canadian Taxpayers Must end NOW. And dont think for a minute that Spence is the only Chief to have been SCREWING Canadians over. As for those Photo op Low lifes: Paul Martin and Justin Trudeau and whatever NDP troll was hanging out with Spence…you all look good with $hit on your collective faces…and in doing so, show yourselves as to what you are…disgusting political opportunists of the lowest kind.
… and besides; cockroaches don’t need accountants.
The CBC has a copy of the audit . I am not an accountant,but it does not look good. Huge payments, to unknown vendors without any supporting documents. This was not the work of just the chief and her boytoy,there had to be many chiefs to spoil the broth to this extent.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/01/07/pol-attawapiskat-audit-monday.html
Folks here should understand that the CBC account and Deloitte’s actual report considerably understates the case of what has been found. I’ve had considerable experience with auditors over the past 20 years, and I understand thoroughly their methods. The key finding is this: that Deloitte found that 80 per cent of the transactions surveyed had insufficient supporting documentation and that 61% had no documentation whatsoever.
For anyone accustomed to audits, this is a staggering finding. Auditors don’t review every transaction; there are thousands of them. They survey a statistically significant sample of all the kinds of transactions an organization has and look for errors.
A forensic audit is when they go in and look for the causes of all the errors. But you still haven’t necessarily identified ALL of the transactions which were illicit.
But in any audit, a finding of 61% with NO documentation means there are NO financial controls at all. There is reason to presume that none of the money can be accounted for. Any private corporation which had an audit result like this would be subject to two things virtually immediately: 1. complete sacking of the entire board of directors and the executive suite; and 2. an immediate criminal investigation looking for criminal wrongdoing.
Even the Mafia keeps better financial records than this.
I am a CA and worked for two of the world’s largest auditing firms for over 20 years, and I basically concur with what cgh says above.
Something doesn’t make sense in this whole thing (well, many things actually). The financial statements that are available on the Attawapiskat web site (attawapiskat.org) have a “clean” audit opinion provided by a firm of Chartered Accountants out of Timmins. If the record keeping is as bad as was indicated by this audit, there is no way they could provide a clean audit opinion.
Which leads me to beleive that Chief Spence et al simply refused to co-operate with the team from Deloitte. So look for that to be the “excuse” on a go-forward basis. “There is nothing wrong with the books, we just refused to co-operate with Harper’s auditors”.
All the same I wouldn’t want to be the partner in charge of this audit from the Timmins firm.
Jethro, I’m NOT a CA; my role was to make sure the institution’s finances were in shape to be audited. That meant exercising proper financial controls on a constant basis. And in all my years of doing it, we never had a single example of undocumented expenditure. We simply rejected expense claims automatically if there was no paperwork. However small the amount was didn’t matter.
Whoever the auditor in Timmins was is in a heap of professional trouble. Decertification is the least of his or her worries. This is seriously reminiscent of Arthur Anderson giving a clean bill of health to Enron. It took down the entire company, with lots and lots and lots of jail time.
And there’s no way any audit could miss “61% no documentation”.
So there’s probably no mystery here at all. The auditors were getting paid off to ignore great steaming piles of poo.
In a normal corporation, the shareholders would be reading the riot act and stringing the board up from the nearest lamp post. But this is the disfunctionality of the Indian Act, isn’t it? There’s no shareholder to be outraged.
“There’s no shareholder to be outraged”.
We are all shareholder but to question anything Indian was automatically deemed racist and the Indians are having a hard time accepting this change in our attitude. “We are fed up” was not supposed to enter the equation. Idle no more has a different interpretation for people that work for a living and are already overtaxed.
So, let’s get rid of the Indian Act & the Treaty..make the reserves townships or villages; depending on the size and they will have to function on the aloted funds…..like everyone else in Canada.
They will pay taxes- like every other Canadian.
They will have have same rights / freedoms as every other Canadian..SAME; NOT MORE OR LESS
NO more Chiefs, a town counsel…. accountable to all of the inhabitants of the town, responsible for themselves & LIABLE for their actions!
The issue that amazes me here is how the CBC manages to be critical of PMSH’s Government in this issue. They have been trying to reform this corrupt system that has been firmly entrenched in large part by the previous Liberal administration. I think this is painfully obvious when you see the support of the likes of Martin and Trudeau .This widespread corruption has been well known by any one who can do simple math. The amount of money that has been poured into these reserves per capita does not square with the outcomes. If you were to give the kind of cash to most non aboriginal families they would have a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. So finally a government takes the bull by the horns and shines alight on the systemic corruption that has been in place for as long as I have been alive and they become the villians in this scenario. Is there any time since PMSH has been steering this country to increasing prosperity in these very challenging times that the CBC has ever has one good thing to say about their efforts. I agree with previous comments that Stephen Harper will go down in history as one of Canada’s greatest Prime Ministers. I can’t be more proud that he has the courage to take on so many white elephants that are not only draining the country of precious resources but are hurting the people they are meant to help. The system has to be reformed in such a way as it gives individuals a leg up instead of a hand out and this has to start by making the leaders accountable. The CBC likes to make the Harper Government accountable for situations that were in place long before they were. Maybe they should use the same standard for the First Nation’s leadership . This country is being changed because we finally have a television channel and reporters who are willing to report the unvarnished truth. Canadians are going to be the wiser and richer for it including the individuals on Canadian Reserves who have been very poorly served by many of their leaders.
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