Brian Whiteside, Winnipeg’s auditor during the fire-paramedic station scandal, resigns

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This article was published 09/04/2015 (3808 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

City auditor Brian Whiteside, a key figure in the 2012 fire-paramedic station saga, has resigned from the City of Winnipeg. 

Whiteside, who effectively forced the city to engage in an external audit into the procurement and construction of four new fire-paramedic stations, chose to leave the city after 18 years of service, for what he describes as personal reasons.

“It was time to go,” he said, noting Winnipeg has a new chief administrative officer and dealt with three external audits into city construction projects and real-estate transactions over the past two years.

“The last two years were extremely difficult. This is entirely my own decision.”

Whiteside was city auditor in August 2012, when the fire-paramedic station scandal emerged. He refused to sign off on an internal review into the program the following month, leading to a joint call for an external audit, along with former mayor Sam Katz.

That audit, by consulting firm EY, concluded contracts were not awarded fairly, council was left in the dark about the program and that former Winnipeg chief administrative officer Phil Sheegl was the primary official responsible. Sheegl resigned in the days before the report’s release in 2013.

Whiteside also administered an external EY audit into Winnipeg real-estate transactions and an external KPMG audit into Winnipeg’s police headquarters project. Both audits concluded severe mismanagement occurred and city processes were not followed.

The police HQ is now under a full-blown RCMP investigation.

In January, Mayor Brian Bowman demanded to know why Whiteside had yet to produce quarterly reports into the city’s response to the trio of audits.

Bowman issued a statement on Thursday, thanking Whiteside for his service.

City council will consider a plan to appoint audit manager Bryan Mansky the acting city auditor on April 22. That would be a prelude to a national search for a new city auditor.