‘Matter of serious public concern’

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This article was published 04/12/2018 (2641 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Auditor general Norm Ricard told a committee of MLAs he regards his decision to give only a “qualified” opinion on last year’s provincial financial report as “a matter of serious public concern.”

The legislative assembly’s standing committee on public accounts heard from both Ricard and senior Finance Department officials Tuesday evening over an AG report in September that cited “significant errors” in the government’s financial statements for 2017-18.

Deputy finance minister Jim Hrichishen told the all-party committee that Manitoba “does not take the qualified opinion lightly.” But he characterized the difference in opinion between the two sides as “a professional disagreement” over the application of public sector accounting standards.

In September, the auditor general rebuked the Progressive Conservative government for overstating the size of last year’s provincial budget deficit, citing two errors. He said the government was wrong to exclude the Workers Compensation Board as a reporting entity in its summary budget statements for 2017-18. And he was critical of the way in which the province transferred $265 million from the Manitoba Agricultural Services Corp. into a trust account.

The effect of the two actions was that the government overstated the deficit by $347 million, the AG said. Rather than peg its summary operating deficit at $348 million, as the auditor general found it should be, the government said it finished the last fiscal year $695 million in the hole.

It was the first time in a decade that a Manitoba auditor general had issued a qualified opinion on the province’s financial statements. The last time it occurred, the province had failed to include school division financial results in its summary budget report.

Hrichishen said his department did a survey of whether other provinces included WCB results in their financial statements and found only Saskatchewan and Manitoba did.

He went so far as to call Manitoba an “outlier” in this regard, a term that caused Ricard to bristle. The AG said his concern is whether Manitoba exercises control over its WCB. And he said nothing has changed in the legislation controlling the board since his office last reviewed the issue more than a decade ago.

NDP MLA James Allum suggested Hrichishen seemed to be “taking a bullet” for the decision of his political masters. He alleged the Progressive Conservative government might have decided to “cook the books” to make the deficit look worse than it was to justify continuing its “austerity program.”

The meeting continued past the Free Press’s deadline.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca