(Ottawa) Two employees of the Office of the Auditor General – the government’s watchdog – have been fired after receiving double pay as both civil servants and contract workers. A third is the subject of an internal investigation for the same reasons. The government’s use of consultants has been the subject of numerous questions since the publication of a report by the Auditor General on the cost overruns of the application ArriveCAN.
“Since 2020, the Office of the Auditor General has become aware of three employees who had a second source of income in the form of contracts with the Government of Canada,” confirmed her spokesperson, Natasha Leduc. Employees did not disclose this information to their superiors. »
The information was first reported by the National Post Wednesday morning.
“None of the employees involved were auditors,” she said. Information regarding the two terminated employees has been transferred to Ottawa police. They weren’t managers either. The third case is still under investigation.
These are new cases that had been unknown to the public since the suspension at the end of February of David Yeo, the founder of Dalian Enterprises Inc., one of the firms that obtained the most public money for the ‘application ArriveCAN. The Ministry of National Defense has opened an investigation because he has held a civil servant job since September while being a consultant for the same ministry.
News of the suspension of another official linked to the financial fiasco ofArriveCAN had the effect of a bomb on Parliament Hill. Dalian has since lost its security clearance from the federal government, which excludes it from all federal contracts.
The company says Mr Yeo did not receive double compensation from the government as he has had “no involvement in the management or operations of Dalian and has not had access to any confidential information” since September 2023 when he began his employment at the ministry. However, a copy of the form submitted to the federal government under the Canadian Business Corporations Act shows that he officially retired as administrator on 1er March.
The government operations committee adopted a motion Wednesday to have him testify in the coming weeks, like the public accounts committee.
“This is a very unusual situation,” admitted the deputy minister of the Ministry of Public Services and Supply, Ariane Reza, last week in parliamentary committee. She indicated that over the past year, only five civil servants were dismissed for contravening the Code of Values and Ethics for the Public Sector.
Under this Code, federal employees must take “all feasible measures to prevent and resolve, in the public interest, any real, apparent or potential conflict of interest between their official responsibilities and their personal affairs.”