NATURE

Sea, land, river

PEOPLES

Community

For earlier materials see Table of Contents

SQCRD Mtg	Friday June 22nd
	New CAO – starts July 16th

John Holland – in town looking for place to rent in PR

Overview

3 QCI directors present via phone conferencing

Little real business

BUT

Agenda package contained 2006 Audit + ‘Forensic Audit’

Apparently voting procedures not yet cleared up – Census data not used thus PR has more votes than legally merits etc

‘Firing Janet’ part 10

Seems BDO Dunwoody hired/ ‘contacted’ on ‘merits of conducting a ‘forensic audit’ --- but lacked focus on specific issue, and only a general feeling ‘things were not right’ --- so company suggests preliminary ‘high level review’ ---Bob Cox 2 days spent in PR and a 9 page report dated 5^th of May given Directors

“We did not find any indication of fraudulent activity or reckless spending” --- suggests (among others) ‘focus on improving governance’

I will go into details later – but here I suggest the Board & especially the executive were quite happy to ‘let Janet do it’ – while they were mainly running on automatic pilot ---- all of a sudden they now see that require more staff etc I suspect they will now hire 2 maybe 3 more staff to do work Janet did alone– thus the high level audit is only partial view of situation (I believe)

More Later

SQCRD Year End for 2006

As these are complex documents that are often opaque to both board and public – the auditor will be asked to attend next meeting in PR (July meeting on Islands thus August will be next PR meeting)

The closing of the dump on QCI deserves much closer scrutiny as large amount $$ needed --- plus billing procedures etc unclear --- and this is the very issue that precipitated the ‘firing of Janet’

In passing the SQCRD received $159,167 in Federal Gas Tax Revenues – of which $11,966 paid to QC Village and the rest remaining – this will be interesting to follow as $$ can only be spent for specific projects

Transparency?

I note too the checks over 5T$ seems to be following a new format --- thus T Hesse pay not included – nor auditors etc –

Presumably applying PR criteria of what constitutes ‘personnel’ info and thus not given public

Critique – transparency?

While the amount of severance ‘given’ (won’t be paid out completely until 2008 and presumably ends if/when Janet gets another (equivalent?) job ---

While that figure given – the amount paid lawyers/ forensic audit etc not given --- though presumably will give itemized report if FOI submitted (I’ll do that next week)

Created by LG on 24/6/2007