The team would be called the “Financial Analysis Service,” said Peter Dobell, a former public servant, founder of the Parliamentary Centre, and an expert on strengthening Parliament, who made the suggestion to MPs last week before the House Government Operations Committee.
Mr. Dobell said the team should consist of a dozen people “with extensive experience in government and financial services who could, as a result, understand the complexity of government finances, which are really pretty difficult to penetrate.”
Mr. Dobell spoke to the House Government Operations Committee May 2. The MPs are studying how to reform the way Parliament looks at the estimates.
Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page and those in his office are “an example of the kind of person who we think should be in the Financial Service,” said Mr. Dobell.
Mr. Dobell said the service could report to Parliament, or directly to the House Government Operations Committee, which was established in the 1960s for the specific purpose of subjecting the spending estimates to better scrutiny.
Peter DeVries, an independent consultant who worked in the federal public service for more than 30 years before retiring in 2005, agreed. “More analyses of the estimates have to be done, and they have to be done by a cast supporting this committee or other committees,” he said.
Mr. DeVries worked in the Department of Finance for more than 20 years, and was responsible for overseeing the making of the budget. He said that the team of experts could be a part of the PBO, or a part of the Library of Parliament, whose analysts already provide research to Parliamentary committees.
Mr. Dobell said that this group of experts would be a more effective way of ensuring the estimates are well-investigated than mandating that committees look at them for a minimum amount of time.
“A few hours isn’t going to make much difference. What I think is important is to get yourselves the kind of support that the Parliamentary budget officer can give,” he said.
Liberal government operations critic John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.), a former economist and a former federal National Revenue minister, said that Parliamentarians need to find a way of uncovering any misspending in the estimates.
“If you don’t know it’s a problem to begin with, until you investigate it, how would you know which things in which departments to isolate? Because you can be sure that those in the departments would be trying to hide their transgressions from people like us,” he said.
With a Financial Analysis Office, said Mr. Dobell, a Parliamentarian could raise his or her concerns with the expert analysts.
“If you say, ‘These are the things that I’m concerned about,’ they can get the information, bring it to your attention privately, as a committee even, and then you can go into it,” he said.
Committee witnesses last week had a number of suggestions on how to make the estimates more relevant and accessible to the Parliamentarians who must vote to approve spending. As with almost all the more than one dozen experts the committee has heard from in its study, last week’s experts said there needs to be more of a link between the measures introduced in the budget, and the main estimates.
“The estimates need an anchor, and that anchor should be the budget,” said Mr. DeVries.
Mr. DeVries said that tabling the budget in February, before the main estimates, would give the main estimates context. Tabling the budget earlier in the year would also enable the inclusion of more budget items in the main estimates, which must be tabled by March 1.
Under the current government, it has been common for the budget to be tabled after the federal government’s main spending estimates are brought to Parliament, noted Mr. DeVries, but as recently as 2005, the reverse was the norm.
Mr. DeVries said that there aren’t any practical obstacles to tabling the budget by mid-February.
“The policy decisions within the budget are normally made within the last calendar year. By December a budget is largely put in place, what you’re waiting for after that is, is there going to be any new economic information that could impact on the budget’s economic projections,” he explained.
Mr. DeVries also said that today, estimates are “largely irrelevant to budget planning” whereas in the 1980s, they were a “fundamental input.”
“Every single expert in this field has come in, and has recommended the exact same thing, that we should be having the budget at least by mid-February, some say January,” noted NDP MP Linda Duncan (Edmonton-Strathcona, Alta.).
“This is all common sense. Where did we go astray? Why are we not doing this?” she added.
The committee will hear from final witnesses on the study this week; Parliamentary counsel from the Legislative Assembly of Alberta; professor Paul Thomas from the University of Manitoba; and officials from the Treasury Board Secretariat, who will be making their second appearance on this study. Starting May 14, the committee will begin to draft its report.
The witnesses also suggested that the estimates could be made more decipherable to Parliamentarians if they were organized on a program basis. Right now, money is presented under votes that are categorized by type of spending, for instance a department’s capital or operating spending.
While the estimates documents do present some information based on the workings of a program, Parliamentarians ultimately vote on vague compilations of countless individual spending items.
“Over the years the government gradually ended up making the votes larger votes, and therefore, when you had a number, when Parliamentarians had a number of x-billion dollars for some great noble purpose, they had absolutely no way of comparing that amount of money with that result,” said former Treasury Board official Martin Ulrich.
Mr. DeVries said that structuring the spending estimates by program would be more understandable to Parliamentarians.
“In your everyday work you deal maybe more with programs that are available to individuals in your constituencies than a vote structure that is very difficult to explain to anybody,” he said.
Mr. Dobell said that committees should focus on examining programs year-round, rather than taking a one-time look at the estimates.
“To get some sense through the work that you would do, on exploring whether the performance on each program corresponded with what you perceived to be the public’s needs and expectations,” he said.
Mr. DeVries said that in examining if programs work well, Parliamentarians could really make a difference on spending.
Conservative MP Mike Wallace (Burlington, Ont.) said that he was concerned that examining programs would amount to an unofficial performance audit of that work, rather than simply making sure that funding wasn’t misspent.
“Does that open then the door that it’s not just a financial audit on the program-—that they’re spending ‘X’ dollars on it and all the invoices match up and that money is going out the door it’s not being wasted—but the actual results, the performance on it?” he said.
Regardless of the other changes this committee recommends on the estimates, Mr. DeVries said that their basis must be switch from cash accounting to accrual, so that the number-crunching matches the public accounts and the budget.
In cash accounting, a transaction would be marked in the books when a payment goes in or out of a department. In accrual accounting, a transaction would be put into the books when a department makes a business deal, regardless of when the money will change hands.
While accrual is the standard in the accounting world, it’s also harder to understand and more subjective, University of Victoria professor David Good told the committee recently.
“I would not move to accrual budgeting,” he said.
“To be frank with you, most Members of Parliament can understand cash, they may have a more difficult time understanding carrying forward liabilities, and so on,” said Mr. Wallace.
Ms. Duncan noted that every Parliamentarian is accountable for the spending in the estimates.
“We all have accountability when we’re voting on the estimates and the budget, the budget implementation bill. We have accountability to our electorate, and we have accountability for whatever portfolio we’re in. We’re really all in this together,” she said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Jessica Bruno
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