OTTAWA — Most parliamentarians would be hard pressed to tell Canadians exactly how hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars were spent last year — and there’s little out there to help them.
The closing financial statements for 2010-11 haven’t been made public nearly seven months after the end of the fiscal year — and about a year-and-a-half since spending was initially approved.
Still, Parliament has given government the green light to spend more than $250 billion this year.
The Public Accounts of Canada, three thick volumes of numbers and dollar signs, provide audited line-by-line statements of government spending.
Although Canada’s auditor general and comptroller general produce high-quality public accounts, they take too long to get in the hands of politicians to allow for proper scrutiny and transparency, said Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.
Sources have told Global News the accounting records are printed, and an internal calendar indicated they would be made public in September.
Public Works and Treasury Board, the federal departments responsible for compiling, printing, and tabling the public accounts, wouldn’t explain the delay, nor say when the documents would be tabled.
The current lag (197 days and counting) isn’t precedent setting, but rather a symptom of the broader problem of the hurdles federal politicians face in their role as scrutineers, Page said.
Financial scrutiny — ensuring Canadians get value for their tax dollars — is a vital responsibility for members of Parliament.
And effective analysis of limited public resources is paramount now, as the country grapples with the threat of another recession, the government’s ambitious goal to balance the budget by 2014-15 and as the spending patterns move from stimulus to austerity, Page said.
“You can’t wait 200 days to know whether, for example, spending spilled over or delays in funding will put deficit pressure into the next year, or an extra billion dollars was spent on a program,” Page said. “You can’t wait 200 days. That is not scrutiny.”
Comparing Canada
Delays will always exist between the end of the fiscal year and the publication of audited reports, said London School of Economics public policy professor Joachim Wehner, who has extensively studied budget processes and the function of public accounts.
But there is a host of other countries that get their audited statements out faster than Canada. Australia and the United States, for example, typically make their documents public within 50 and 80 days respectively.
Even within Canada, some provinces table their public accounts quicker than Ottawa. Nova Scotia has done it within 110 days, Alberta in about 80 days and Saskatchewan in less than 70.
At the most basic level, government gets a “whole lot of money from Parliament without much scrutiny,” Wehner said.
Parliament approved more than $250 billion in 2011-12 spending requests during the short session in June without knowing exactly how the government used its alloted funds the year before.
“The very least you want to have is an assurance that the money was spent the way it was supposed to be spent,” Wehner said. “And if you don’t have public accounts that are produced reasonably quickly and are accurate, you lose that.”
From a technical point of view, there is no reason Canada shouldn’t be able to produce these documents within three to six months, Wehner said.
“Canada must have first-rate IT systems for producing accounting information. There’s no other reason that would hold a country up,” he said.
Short-term and long-term fixes
Getting the public accounts to parliamentarians earlier wouldn’t solve all problems of oversight and transparency.
“It’s a mess,” Page said of the appropriations and reporting system. “It’s a mess. From the point of view of our appropriations system, I think it’s fair to say that for most parliamentarians, they don’t feel an incentive to scrutinize.”
The lack of incentive likely stems from several factors, Page said.
Under the current system, any spending proposal an MP tries to change automatically becomes a confidence bill and risks overthrowing the government.
A lack of human resources, other agendas and a budget schedule that seems to hinder oversight rather than encourage it likely also weigh in, he said.
In the face of existing hurdles, however, parliamentarians can take advantage of the increased volume of data coming from the federal receiver general, the quarterly updates Page’s office prepares and the in-year finance reports every department and agency recently started issuing, Page said.
“But if you just do that without structural changes, I don’t think we’re going to make the progress we need,” Page said.
Opposition MPs missed the boat on making structural changes that could have improved the system, said Democracy Watch founder Duff Conacher.
“They could have changed the budget schedule and given themselves a pool of extra staff to help drill down into the numbers. But they should have made these changes and set new standards during the minority days,” he said.
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