Brampton residents, councillors demand police probe into secret $1.25M staff fund
Details of secretive fund revealed in a report delivered to Brampton’s audit committee last week.

TheStar.com
June 12, 2017
Peter Criscione

Brampton taxpayers and councillors are demanding a police investigation into a secretive program authorized by senior staffers who paid non-union employees $1.25 million without council’s knowledge or approval going back to 2009.

“The whole administration in Brampton has become a joke,” said Regional Councillor John Sprovieri, as questions mount about who was behind and benefitted from the secretive fund revealed in a report delivered to the audit committee last week. The fund handed out discretionary salary increases to 167 non-union city employees — including bonuses for “favouritism” — between Jan. 1, 2009, and May 14, 2014, the report found.

“Council did not authorize these payments and staff took the money without proper approvals and that to me is no better than someone taking money out of the cash (register) when nobody is looking,” Sprovieri said in an interview.

The bombshell news last week led to a flood of calls and emails to the Brampton Guardian and social media posts by taxpayers demanding a police probe. Responding to the outcry, Sprovieri said, “I think we should call in the cops to see if this was fraud and whoever was responsible for approving this should be brought to justice.”

Sprovieri said he will seek council’s support for a police force other than Peel’s (to avoid any appearance of a conflict) to conduct the investigation.

The audit report delivered to councillors June 7 focuses on a practice that became common among the city’s non-union staff called Outside Policy Requests (OPR).

Payments to individual staff ranged from as little as $123 to more than $95,000, the audit report said. A total of $316,000 was paid to just eight employees.

Councillors will vote next week (June 21) on staff’s recommendation to immediately abandon the OPR practice.

Brampton’s auditors said the bonuses were not authorized under relevant rules and that, over time, OPR “requests were approved for reasons beyond its initial intention.” They added that with no oversight or formalized processes “the OPR practice became mismanaged.”

The report notes that “favouritism” was listed as one of the top 10 reasons to allow an OPR bonus in documents never shared publicly or with council.

After the report’s release, Mayor Linda Jeffrey stepped up her previous calls to have an outside set of eyes look further into the city’s finances. She has even suggested a permanent, independent auditor general for Brampton, similar to the oversight of council and administrators in their “stewardship over public funds” that Toronto’s AG provides.

“This is at best serious negligence and at worst corruption,” she said in an email last week. “I will continue to explore any and all avenues available to us.”

With residents screaming for an investigation, Jeffrey said Monday she would support “any third-party investigation ... residents are demanding that we get to the bottom of this and respect their tax dollars.”

Many taxpayers agree.

“Brampton taxpayers deserve answers,” said resident George Startup, who attends most city council meetings and has been highly critical of staff mismanagement in the past.

Asked who was responsible for initiating and approving the program and payments, and for the names of staffers that received the secret bonuses, Brampton spokesperson Natalie Stogdill said, “The city will not be citing specific individuals.”

“We are committed to the recommendations and action plans to strengthen our internal controls moving forward,” read a statement provided by the city.

Regional Councillor Elaine Moore, who chaired the audit committee for much of the period identified in the audit report, said she knew nothing of the practice and would throw her support behind a police investigation.

Regional Councillor Gael Miles, who has been on council for three decades and is the former budget chair who directly oversaw city budgets during much of the secret OPR program, defended the practice last week, denying that the secretive payments amounted to a “slush fund.”