Latest Leak
Released on October 01, 2013, 1:00 AM EDT
Tag #: 661
Lack of Accountability: Tax Dollars at Waste




City’s labour and employment legal expenses on the rise
Incompetence of top bureaucrat in the human resources division exposed

(From left) Khoraych: City’s “cover-up” lawyer from a Toronto legal firm; Fowke: Incompetent and negligent; Canapini: Bad legal advice

City’s "gravy-obsessed" bureaucrats spent millions of tax dollars on labour and employment matters rather than addressing real issues in the workplace. WikiLeaks, Sudbury’s investigative team, uncovered the amount of tax dollars wasted by the City’s top bureaucrats; spent on legal fees for matters (specifically, mediations, arbitrations, tribunal hearings and court proceedings) against its own employees from 2005 to 2011. The City’s incompetent bureaucrats wasted millions of tax dollars with an amount reaching $1,640,347.33.  And yet the estimated annual budget approved by the City Council is only $151,865. The City’s labour and employment legal expenses went over budget in 2011 by 168.57% and overall by 201.67% over the 4 year period.  

Details are as follows:

Table 1: Details of Labour and employment expenses 2005-2011

* Baseline data could not be uncovered. Records will be released to the public soon after we uncover them.
 
Graphical Analysis






  

The City’s legal service department consists of 11 staff members including lawyers. While Jamie Canapini, City Solicitor and Kristen Newman, Assistant City solicitor were continually eating up thousands of tax dollars every month, they were still unable to find a sustainable solution for labour issues. Furthermore, Kevin Fowke, director of the Human Resources division attempted to cover-up the issues rather than find a solution. Likewise, he attempted to exercise a heavy handed management style against employees.  Their attempts have completely failed and the rising legal cost of labour and employment matters is now clearly evident.   Regardless, neither Canapini nor Newman appeared before the court or tribunal to defend any case against the bureaucrats and continued hiring private lawyers. A large amount of tax dollars were wasted. What is worse is that this wasting of tax dollars still currently continues and is steadily rising. Canapini and Fowke are pushing the City administration into an authoritarian direction. Another dramatic secret concerning the City’s legal expenses was also uncovered. The City’s legal service division and human resources department hired Mireille Khoraych, a lawyer from a Toronto-based legal firm, specifically to cover-up the misconduct of bureaucrats. The cases assigned to Khoraych range from sexual harassment to reprisal. It seems Kevin Fowke does not restrain his selfishness, in his haste to protect their own club, by spending tax dollars to cover the legal fees paid to Khoraych including hotel charges and airfare fees. WikiLeaks Sudbury expects to release more information to the public regarding the legal fees paid to city's "cover-up" lawyer, Mireille  Khoraych. Sudbury has many professional legal firms who possess the capability to handle any labour or employment issues. It is obviously not a sound, economical, decision to hire a lawyer from Toronto. It seems that the City’s bureaucrats hired Khoraych from Toronto to maintain the issues secret and keep the public under the dark. WikiLeaks Sudbury will not disclose the name of the private legal firm in order to protect third party economic interests. Recently, Ontario Ombudsman, Andre Marin said publicly that Canapini had given City Councillors “bad legal advice,” and said that Sudbury’s solicitor had launched an unsuccessful complaint about him to the Law Society of Upper Canada. City solicitor Canapini has made news on many occasions giving controversial opinions. Canapini clashed with Auditor General Brian Bigger when Bigger was auditing Sudbury Transit in 2011, as his department attempted to investigate a missing $800,000 in transit ticket money.  Canapini argued that they were covered by solicitor-client privilege, were the property of City Council and thus advised them not to turn them over to the auditor. Bigger’s office then spent $20,000 on outside legal advice in an attempt to gain access to the documents. Canapini, again, disagreed with Bigger regarding Healthy Community Initiatives Funds. Canapini told councillors he had already reviewed the legal aspects of the funds and found no issues. WikiLeaks Sudbury demand public inquiry for the over-spending of tax dollars on labour and employment matters. Fowke and Canapini must be held accountable and should immediately step-down and provide answers to tax payers.

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Editorial
Released on October 01, 2013 at 01:00 AM EDT

The original article initially published on working paper,  Washington: US Department of Justice.  Excerpts from the article as follows.

Prevention, Detection, and Correction of Corruption in Local Government: A Presentation of Potential Models

In 1976 and 1977, researchers from SRI International examined corruption problems, searching through more than 250 newspapers for reports of corruption incidents from 1970 through 1976. The newspapers searched reported 372 incidents of corruption over the period 1970-1976. There is no way of telling how many more incidents would have been found if all 1,700 newspapers had been examined, nor is there any way of telling how many incidents occurred that were never reported. Certainly, however, newspapers pay more attention to the misdeeds of high officials than to those of petty bureaucrats, and are more likely to report big-ticket scandals than nickel and-dime payoffs.

Corruption is not confined to one area of the country. Similarly, corruption is not confined to anyone type of local government. Of the incidents reported, 56% arose in central cities; 31 % involved county governments; and 14% concerned suburbs or independent cities. Thus, corruption can appear almost anywhere; no area of the country or type of government is immune.

The injustice of corruption adds to the sense of alienation of the poor who have no bottle of scotch to convince the police to take a burglary complaint; no fifty-dollar-bill to convince the building inspector not to notice the rat holes, rat droppings, and boarded up fire door; no twenty to fold inside the driver's license for the patrolman. The cost of corruption and the inability to estimate what those costs will be in the future add to the incentive business has to leave a corrupt city when profit margins shrink. The fear that the pusher can offer the police more to let him stay in business than the parent can offer to get him out adds to the desire of many families to abandon a corrupt city for a less corrupt - or not corrupt - suburb.

We expect elected officials and city/county employees to serve the public interest to the best of their ability. When officials or employees sell public contracts or immunity from laws, the public has effectively lost control over its government. The resentment over one incident - even though it may not reveal itself in the next election - reveals itself in increasing contempt for politicians and public servants, increased voter apathy, increased resistance to tax increases and law enforcement efforts, and a strong sense that "equal treatment under the law" is a sick joke.

Corruption has three main components that are controllable and one that is not. The three controllable ones are opportunity, incentive, and risk; the uncontrollable one is personal honesty. Many public servants over a long period of time have had the freely available opportunity to be corrupt, a large incentive to do so, and lime risk of being found out if they did, but have refused because "it wouldn't be honest."

Although we cannot control individual honesty - or even measure it reliably in spite of the flood of psychological tests on the market - we can control the conditions under which public employees and public officials operate. It may be true that the corrupt individual is a ''bad apple” but we can only know that after he has committed a corrupt act and has been found out. It seems much more intelligent to control those aspects we can control, rather than to leave it all to individual differences that can only be discovered after damage has been done.

Controlling the incentive is the most difficult. There will be situations in local government where a zoning change can bring a developer hundreds of thousands of extra dollars of profit, where a contract is being let for a multimillion-dollar sports arena and convention center, where crime syndicates stand to lose millions of dollars if the laws are strictly enforced against gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and bootlegging. There will be situations in local government where a small incentive exists, but the opportunity comes up several times in the course of a day, as for building inspections, health and sanitation inspections, or traffic violations.

Corruption by elected officials and public employees can be a major source of public dissatisfaction with local government. When officials take money from individuals of firms doing business with or regulated by the city, the costs of government rise, regulations go unenforced, and public health or safety may be endangered. Finally, corruption destroys the accountability of employees to their supervisors and of officials to the citizens they represent.

Official corruption can be as simple as a $10 payment to avoid a speeding ticket or to "expedite" a building permit, or it can be as complex as schemes to defraud welfare programs and tolerate organized crime. Corruption may involve a single "rotten apple" or an entire department or city council, a single payoff or an ongoing protection network.

It can arise in virtually any program or activity conducted by local government. Despite this multifaceted quality of local official corruption, many simple and inexpensive steps can be taken to prevent corruption or to reduce its impact when it occurs. Simple diagnostic procedures will identify the areas where corruption is most likely to occur or where it may already be taking place. Ordinances and codes can clarify expectations of official integrity and reduce potential conflicts of interest. Systematic management procedures can increase the ability of supervisors' to monitor the activities of their employees and to investigate actual or potential problem areas.

As is true with other' forms of illegal behaviour, police, prosecutors, and other criminal justice agencies have an important role to play in combating official corruption. We believe that an even greater role must be played by elected officials, managers, and the public, since the first line of defense against corruption must be effective prevention, detection, and control programs. As a result, this report focuses on the experiences of local government agencies and citizens' groups rather than on criminal justice strategies. While much remains to be done by way of detailed experimentation and evaluation of corruption control programs, we hope that this report will assist local officials and citizens to analyze their problems and develop useful and effective programs.

Editor
WikiLeaks Sudbury
October 01, 2013

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