City Of Toronto's Ponzi Scheme

City shamefully hides numbers

By SUN MEDIA

When you spend taxpayers' money, you're not supposed to treat taxpayers like mushrooms.

That is, keep them in the dark and cover them with manure.

Last March, the city discovered the consultant it hired to calculate its unfunded liability for its employee sick leave plans had underestimated the amount by $200 million.

The actual liability was $450 million, not $250 million. The consultant incorrectly assumed workers were only allowed to cash in up to three months of sick days upon retirement. Actually, it's six.

That taxpayers are only finding this out now -- having recently endured a 39-day civic workers' strike where Mayor David Miller said the key issue was the high cost of the city's sick leave plans -- is outrageous.

During the negotiations, both sides were given the correct, revised figures for the liability as it applied to the city's inside and outside workers. That was $140 million, made public at the time.

But no one told taxpayers this had been revised upwards because of an error discovered months earlier, or that the total liability for all city employees, including police, firefighters, TTC and others, had now jumped to $450 million from $250 million.

The city's explanation for not reporting the error then, which it acknowledges "does have a long-term impact on the city's finances and future budgets" is that it would normally have gone to the audit committee in June, but since that was cancelled due to the strike, the first opportunity to present it became this week's meeting of the audit committee.

Miller spokesman Stuart Green said yesterday the mayor knew about the accounting error, but not the exact amount, prior to the strike. However, it was decided not to release the information in a piecemeal fashion at that time, he said.

Coun. Mike Del Grande said it appears Miller didn't want the embarrassing error known until after the strike, which Green denied.

The fact remains the city discovered a huge accounting error in March regarding its sick leave liability costs -- the major issue in the strike -- and we're only finding out now.

That's a disgrace