Thompson-Nicola Regional District board members have voted to allow a third-party audit of how taxpayer dollars were spent in the past five years.
The proposal for the audit came from board chair Ken Gillis, in response to a year-long investigation done by Kamloops This Week showing more than $517,000 of taxpayer money was expensed by former CAO Sukh Gill between 2015 and 2020. Much of that spending was on luxury hotels, fine restaurants, coffee shops, golf courses and other high-end discretionary locations, for himself and other TNRD directors and staff.
Most of the spending was outside of regular work hours, and Gillis and the current CAO have called much of the spending excessive.
The vote to allow the audit passed by a 25-1 vote at the table. Cache Creek mayor Santo Talarico was the only director who voted against the proposal.
“Directors may feel comfortable with where we’ve come and the steps we’ve made. But I think what this independent review is going to do is look at things we may not be aware of. Or things that could’ve been done better that none of us are aware of. And I think we owe that to the public,” Sun Peaks mayor Al Raine, the chair of the TNRD audit committee, said.
“This is an open review. If they discover things that we’re not aware of, then there are other changes we’ll have to make. But I don’t think we should be comfortable by saying, ‘we knew some changes had to be made, we made a few changes, and kind of everything is alright.’ We’re doing this because we want to make sure that, absolutely, everything is alright.”
Current CAO Scott Hildebrand, who started in his role in August, says the independent audit is estimated to cost between $50,000 and $75,000. The TNRD will now put out a request for proposal for a company to do it.
Hildebrand says the investigation will cover the past five years, but could go back further.
“It’ll include a thorough review of managers, senior managers, CAO and board of director expenses and expenditures,” he said. “All expenses, contracts and financial documentation will be included in this investigation, and in the final terms of reference, to be brought back to the board for awareness and approval.”
Area P director Mel Rothenburger suggested, in the interest of transparency, the TNRD could make a quarterly report publicly available online, where any spending from regional district staff or directors that was reimbursed with taxpayer dollars could be found. Raine points out this is already common practice among Members of Parliament at the federal government level.
TNRD finance director Doug Rae indicated if it were done at the TNRD, more staffing resources would be needed to compile that kind of reporting.