What went wrong with Richmond Hill councillors’ expense reports?

City corrects $2,000 worth of errors in councillor's report

Yorkregion.com
Oct. 28, 2019
Sheila Wang

The revised dollar amounts, the re-categorized expense items and the disappearance and reappearance of expenditure forms. Richmond Hill’s reports on some councillors’ spending of public money for the first half of 2019 has drawn many questions from taxpayers.

How much did the nine elected representatives spend in total in the first six months of this year?

The answer based on the updated reports would be $59,816.

It was roughly $2,000 less than what The Liberal previously reported in an article Oct. 6, a day before Regional Councillor Joe DiPaola’s expense report was revised and reposted on the city’s website.

In the article, DiPaola was reported to have claimed a little over $7,000 on the taxpayers’ dime, including over $6,000 filed under the category of “unallocated.”

These figures were initially released in DiPaola’s report by the city along with other eight councillors on Sept. 26. Then, the report went off-line Oct. 2, a week after it was made public.

When the report came back online, it showed that DiPaola claimed about $5,160 in the first two quarters this year with a few items removed.

The city’s spokesperson Meeta Gandhi noted that the finance division found errors in DiPaola's original report which were made due to miscoding.

The Liberal compared the two reports of DiPaola line by line and found what items were taken out from the previous report, which might have spared the taxpayers’ a couple of thousand dollars.

The biggest-ticket item removed was DiPaola’s summary was a rental expense at Eagle Nest Golf Course where DiPaola spent about $1,800 on April 12.

The event was funded by external sponsors, not by tax dollars, the spokesperson responded on Oct. 8.

DiPaola's expense at a Kingbridge conference on Jan. 25 ($78.56) and at Kelseys on Feb. 17 ($77.53) were no longer included in the updated expense report, either.

“Similar to most organizations, staff and members of council use purchase cards to procure goods or services. Policies are in place that guide staff in the types of items and the maximum dollar value that can be purchased in this way,” Gandhi wrote in an email response.

She added the administrative assistants of each council member were in charge of coding and submitting their councillors’ expenses through the city’s finance system. The finance division will be verifying the expenses before final approval for reimbursement.

These errors may have occurred because the city has been transitioning into a new finance system, Gandhi said.

A majority of DiPaola’s expenditure stayed in his revised report and now filed under different categories.

For example, DiPaola shelled out over $1,000 at St. Georges Golf on March 5 to entertain business representatives. It was originally claimed as “unallocated expense,” but was later moved to the category of business meetings.

The same "coding errors" by administrative staff happened to Regional Councillor Carmine Perrelli's report as well, which had been caught and corrected earlier.

Perrelli’s report was temporarily taken off-line on Sept. 30 and came back online with three items removed, The Liberal reported.

DiPaola and Carmine shared administrative staff -- Mike Makrigiorgos -- the chief of staff who took the position in March to assist the two regional councillors and Ward 1 Coun. Greg Beros.

Makrigiorgos told The Liberal in a previous article that the three representatives hired him through their budgets for administrative support.

The two regional councillors each have their own administrative assistants as well.