Public Commons

Part of 2013

To Susan Bartleman, Stephen Graham, Glen Synowicki, Marcel Viera

Dear Mr.Graham,

Your email does not have the information I specifically asked for (included again below). So I assume that the city no longer intends to provide me -- or the public -- with detailed information about revenue at Dufferin Grove. Your document only has the SAP totals, which is not helpful information under the circumstances.

However, I had already mailed off the same questions to FOI yesterday morning before I saw your email. I'm interested to see what the FOI response will be.

Because of the auditor's concern about Pcard spending in the past, detailed expenditure information is public as far as the Pcard expenditures are concerned (although not, as far as I can see, for gift cards or purchase orders or petty cash). The only problem is the time lag of posting, so that now in April the Pcard postings show only to the end of January. Maybe with FPARS, the schedule of those kinds of postings will be more timely.

Your email did not comment on the double Pcard entries for Dufferin Grove in June/July 2013, and I see they have not yet been corrected. Is there an intention to correct the error, or is there something I'm not understanding about the system of entering amounts?

Book-keeping is a tricky business, it's easy to make errors, and it seems to me that the more collaboration and openness there are, the more likely that mistakes can be found and fixed. Management's decision to hide the details from the public and even from its front-line staff is not going to help. The sooner this approach is reversed, the better for the programs.

Yours truly, Jutta Mason