Innocent Misdemeanors?

"Deloitte had to obtain and review information from third parties regarding other possible sources of reimbursements, some of which is still outstanding and has been indicated by third parties that the information should be provided by the end of June 2013. As such, reporting without this information would not be appropriate."
Interim audit report, Deloitte

Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press   An unidentified man shields Sen. Pamela Wallin from media cameras as she arrives at the Senate entrance on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Thursday, June 6, 2013. 

 

The auditing of Senator Pamela Wallin's expense claims has been ongoing for six months. In a review of her spending from her Senate appointment date in 2009 to September of 2012. In a personal acknowledgement that a number of inconsistencies and obvious misappropriations have taken place, Senator Wallin initiated a partial pay-back of $38,000 to the Senate as an interim measure. Awaiting the final tally to determine more precisely just how much she owes back to the Senate.


When a notice of possible ethical malfeasance came to the public eye through the medium of investigative journalism, it seemed Senator Wallin's whopping travel bill alone, totalling some $350,000 in travel expenses for a three-year period was at issue. More latterly, however, the issue of whether Senator Wallin also made improper housing claims has also come to light.  And now there is an additional focus on double-billing.

The question is whether Senator Wallin billed the Senate for travel expenses at the same time that she billed executive boards on which she sat, for travel and business meetings she attended on their behalf. Ms. Wallin as good as informed a CBC interviewer that some of her travel expense claims handed in to the Senate for reimbursement may indeed have been for private business -- not party business, she stressed. But she denies double billing.

"We have found none of that. Zero. None. I don't know what the auditors have found because we don't have the report. That's why nobody more than me wants that report as soon as we possibly can" (sic), she stressed. The auditors wrote in a letter to the Senate's internal economy committee onJune 10 that they were in the process of reviewing "other possible sources of reimbursements". Senator Wallin's office, studiously looking at their records was able to find none.

But that search by the auditors to determine whether there was evidence that Senator Wallin double-billed for some of her many trips, charging them both to the Senate and to one of many boards she was privileged to sit on such as Porter Airlines and wealth management firm Gluskin Sheff and Associates, is ongoing. Awaiting obvious input from those sources.

No one is rushing to judgement, obviously. Everyone is wondering, nonetheless, how honourable members of the Senate of Canada could conceivably appear by their actions to be so unscrupulously ethically challenged.