Issues at the office of the municipal watchdog stretched beyond delays in completing the 18 scheduled audits.
As one Prince George city councillor found out, the auditor general for local government was behind on her email inbox as well.
Coun. Brian Skakun sent the office an email on April 11, 2014, inquiring about the course of action by which the city could request its own value-for-money audit.
"I wanted to know what the process would be for the City of Prince George to ask them to audit our asphalt program, for example, because I know they're supposedly doing other audits," said Skakun.
But months went by without any word.
"It was a new government office and I thought eventually they're going to get back to me," said Skakun. Other issues, such as last fall's municipal election, pushed it further from his mind, Skakun said, but when a response finally arrived "I thought wow, that took a long time."
Skakun received an email back from the office on Jan. 13, 2015, a couple days beyond nine months since he sent his initial note.
The reply contained an apology for the "extreme delay" in responding and said the AGLG staff are "working hard at being responsive to everyone who writes to our office and have established correspondence service standards to improve our performance going forward."
In its latest service plan, the office acknowledged problems with its correspondence record, receiving more than 350 messages in its first year "and found that we did not have sufficient resources in place to meet the aggressive standards we set for 2013/14," said the report. "As a result, we continue to work to deal with a backlog of correspondence, some of which requires significant resources to deal with as thoroughly as they deserve."
Those ultimate goals are to provide an initial acknowledgment within two days and then a more-comprehensive response to 75 per cent of messages in three months, with all of them receiving proper responses within six months.
As for Skakun's request, the AGLG office isn't currently looking at ad-hoc audits. The office is also "on track" to begin work required to allow them to do a performance audit at a local government's request "on a cost recovery basis."
"While the city of Prince George is not selected at this time, we do update our audit planning process annually to take into account emerging issues relevant to the operations of local governments," the email to Skakun said.
To date, the office has released three reports, with 16 more still to come, including one for the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George.
The office has been the focus of increased scrutiny due to the reporting delay and Monday's abrupt dismissal of auditor Basia Ruta.
On Tuesday, Community, Sport and Cultural Development Minister Coralee Oakes repeated her discontent with the work of the office.
"That's why we exhausted every option over several months to ensure the success of the office," Oakes told the legislature. "It is absolutely prudent that we look at the work that is necessary to ensure the success of this office."
That's work that should have already been done, said NDP MLA Mike Farnworth.
"Had that been done, we wouldn't have wasted $5.2 million," he said. "At the time that this idea was floated from the brain of the Premier, the questions were raised by local governments about the effectiveness and the way the government was wanting to implement this particular program."
Skakun agreed that the province "dropped the ball" on the oversight of the auditor general for local government, but hopes that it will ultimately be viable.
"I think it's a great idea to have somebody or some group in place that can really scrutinize how municipalities spend money above what we do with our annual reporting."
