And as Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government threatens public sector pay freezes to help eliminate a $14.4-billion deficit, McCarter found the costs of Crown attorneys, Ontario Provincial Police and the youth criminal justice systems rising at alarming levels despite declining crime rates — with OPP officers preferring 12-hour shifts that cover slow overnight periods but give them more days off.
McCarter also uncovered almost $25 million in costs to set up an electronic registry of diabetes patients — despite boasts from the health ministry that cancelling a private company’s contract to develop the registry’s computer system, first revealed in the Star, cost taxpayers nothing because delivery deadlines were missed.
“Although eHealth (Ontario) and the ministry have made no significant payments to this vendor, they have still incurred $24.4 million in internal costs related to the registry since 2008,” McCarter wrote in his 445-page report.
The document, as thick as a telephone book, is a yearly litany of government trouble spots where taxpayers are being shortchanged.
Auditor’s reports are typically a field day for opposition parties, but the impact will be blunted this year with the legislature and the daily question period suspended following McGuinty’s surprise resignation in October.
Still, he girded for criticism Tuesday, telling reporters “there will always be room for improvement” in a government that employs or oversees 1.3 million public sector workers.
McCarter also found fault with the Drive Clean program, poor supervision of medical tests like CT scans, long waits for nursing home beds leaving many seniors in hospital too long, low take-up on cancer screening programs and poor graduation rates for aboriginal students.
He did not examine the controversial costs of at least $230 million to scrap gas-fired electricity plants in Liberal ridings in Oakville and Mississauga before last fall’s provincial election that reduced the Liberals to a minority government.
Opposition parties charged the cancellations were a politically motivated “seat saver” move to protect Liberal MPPs from defeat, and McCarter is examining the costs of scrapping those contracts and moving the plants elsewhere in a special report due next spring. Critics say the cost could be closer to $1 billion or more.
On the tax front, the auditor discovered bureaucrats in charge of chasing delinquents for took “an average of seven months to even attempt to reach the taxpayer by phone.”
This is why — along with failure to enforce liens and warrants or passing up on personal visits to non-payers — $1.4 billion of the $2.4 billion owed in corporate and retail taxes may have to be written off.
“Taking prompt action is vital in collecting debts,” said McCarter, a veteran accountant. “Research shows that the probability of collecting money that’s owed drops dramatically as time passes.”
The first audit of the Crown attorney service since 1993 found the number of prosecutors and staffing costs of $256 million have more than doubled since then, while the number of criminal charges laid “has barely changed at all,” McCarter said.
In addition, Ontario led the nation in adult criminal charges stayed or withdrawn, at 43 per cent versus 26 per cent for the rest of Canada, and trailed the nation in guilty verdicts with 56 per cent versus an average of 69 per cent in other provinces.
While the attorney general’s office said criminal cases require more prep time by prosecutors, “they have little underlying information to assess Crown attorneys’ workloads or the way cases are being handled across the province,” McCarter said.
Higher employee costs also drove a 25 per cent increase in youth justice service costs to $370 million since 2005 — a time period that saw the number of youth served rise by just 4 per cent to 9,200, mainly in community supervision with just 600 in custody.
About half the beds in jails and custody facilities were filled.
The OPP came under fire from McCarter for expenses that “continue at well above the inflation rate” despite a slide in crime and serious car accidents.
With an operating budget of $979 million, of which 87 per cent goes to staffing and overtime, the OPP has a problem with too many officers working 12-hour shifts to take advantage of more days off.
This results in too many officers being deployed during the slow early-morning hours when fewer officers are needed on duty, and in an era when overtime costs during busy periods of the day are up 60 per cent since 2004.
“Most of the OPP’s costs are associated with officer salaries, so it is critical that staffing be based on actual demand for services . . . having the right number of officers working in the right place at the right time,” McCarter wrote.
He also found too few people are taking advantage of cancer-screening programs and that the Drive Clean program for curbing vehicle emissions has been less effective than improving pollution-control standards for cars and trucks.
Drive Clean, which has been in place since 1999, now requires owners of vehicles that are seven years old to get emission tests.
But, ironically, any repairs required to meet emission standards do not have to exceed $450.—and the partial repairs leave about 25 per cent of vehicles with worse emissions readings.
McCarter took aim at the education system, finding just 45 per cent of self-identified aboriginal students in Grade 10 are on track to graduate, compared with 74 per cent of their cohort.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Rob Ferguson and Richard J. Brennan
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