Work on Mile One audit 'action plans' ongoing, city won't release final report

St. John's city council says it's taking action to address issues identified by an auditor's report into missing money at Mile One Centre, and expects to provide an update to taxpayers this fall.

But the city is refusing to release the internal auditor's final report, and won't provide details about what the auditor found.

City officials said doing so would "jeopardize the safety of employees at Mile One," because the report "contains details of the cash-handling process at Mile One, including cash movements and the amount of cash on hand."

The problem first came to light in June 2017, when Coun. Sandy Hickman revealed that city accounting staff "found something that was unusual and surprising in the books."

A few months later, the city issued a press release to provide an interim update on the progress of the investigation.

That October 2017 update revealed that the unexplained amount of missing cash was $58,089 roughly half of the initial estimate of $114,863.

"There was a breakdown in the financial procedures and that needs to be corrected," Mayor Danny Breen said at the time.

The city said a final report with recommendations for improvement would be completed.

CBC News couldn't find any further information aboutthat final report on the city's website, and recently filed an access-to-information request for it.

It turns out the matter came tocouncil's audit committee in June 2018. The city wouldn't release the actual report itself, but did provide a two-page decision note tabled at that meeting, to approve the "action plans" put forward by management.

But the decision note was not included in the 142 pages of documents related to that meeting available on the city's website.

City officials said that was "due to staff oversight," and it was recently posted after CBC News brought the omission to their attention.

'Weaknesses in the internal control structure'

It seems no one will ever knowexactly what happened to the money.

"Unfortunately, due to weaknesses in the internal control structure it is not possible to determine if the remaining variance of $58,089.05 is due to further accounting errors, errors made during the counting of cash, theft, or some combination of these events," the 2018 decision note advised.

"The report puts forth 53 recommendations to help strengthen the internal controls in an effort to lower risk when handling and accounting for food and beverage cash and sales at Mile One Centre."

CBC News has asked the province's access-to-information watchdog to review the city's decision to withhold the entire 66-page internal auditor's report.

According to the city, a followup report will be presented to the audit committee this September, and a public update is expected in the early fall.

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