Boreal

SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

Proof of Perjury

I had always wondered why the department would risk losing tens of millions of dollars by insisting that I do a job that required the use of a large mainframe computer using only an adding machine, pencil and paper. It did not make sense. I need not have wondered. They were not risking anything except my mental and physical health. The computerized Currency Fluctuation Reporting System (CFRS) that I had developed had already been integrated within the larger departmental Financial Management System (FMS) when they demanded their impossible and now pointless report.

Managers at Foreign Affairs were a rather ruthless and arrogant bunch, but they were not stupid. You can’t stop accounting for tens of millions of dollars without someone noticing—someone at Treasury Board, for instance.

The Treasury Board, like Foreign Affairs, is a pillar of the Federal Government. The Treasury Board sets overall government policy for both financial and personnel administration. As financial accounting overseer, it is responsible for ensuring that all moneys are properly accounted for. As general manager of the public service, it has overall responsibility for the welfare and equitable treatment of public servants. In carrying out both its primary functions in the story told so far, it failed miserably. As manager of the public purse, the Treasury Board had a duty to investigate Foreign Affairs’ claim that it was losing millions of dollars through managerial incompetence and theft.

Under oath, Foreign Affairs officials swore that millions of dollars had been lost and that they were still hemorrhaging millions more because of my alleged refusal to do what they claimed was a simple report that no manager or other financial officer was capable of doing.

Under oath, Foreign Affairs’ managers swore that during the course of almost three years they never bothered to learn how a system which accounted for tens of millions of taxpayer dollars actually worked. Treasury Board had to know they were lying. How else can you explain their indifference to the loss of millions of taxpayer dollars?

They knew it was a lie, a lie its legal team—like the letter from Joe Clark—was only too happy to exploit, compromising their ethics to perpetuate a crime. In 2008, I found unassailable proof that Foreign Affairs' officials had lied under oath and that Treasury Board had to know they were lying. The proof is in an unclassified memorandum dated November 4, 1982. It is from Richard the new head of the Financial System Analysts section to his boss Dave Gordon, the Director of the Financial Planning and Analysis Division. The salient portion of the memorandum are offset; the underlining is the author of the memorandum's doing.

Subject: Currency Fluctuation Reporting System (CFRS)

As a result of the October 27^th meeting with Bill Crandall (Crandall was with Treasury Board) on this subject, we have gone through a re-assessment on the monthly reports on the effect of currency fluctuation on post expenditures. In order to properly understand the system, I attach Appendix A which traces through our present system (the system I developed on my own initiative) an application of currency fluctuation for reporting for Warsaw’s LES (Locally Engaged Staff) budget for the first six months of the 1982/83 fiscal year.

2. The rationale (my methodology) or basis on which the year-to-date currency fluctuation gain of $45,524 is calculated is very sound and justifiable for the purpose of reporting the actual currency fluctuation gain to Treasury Board ...

Later in the memorandum, its author acknowledges the value of my method of forecasting future gains and losses.

3 The next step in the CFRS is the computation of a forecasted currency fluctuation gain/loss on the estimated post spending for the remainder of the fiscal year …. The application of the gain/loss percentage to the unspent budget balance calculated in this manner (my formula) provides a very reliable forecast of currency fluctuation of gains and losses on the estimated post spending for the remainder of the fiscal year.

He finishes his memorandum with a recommendation.

6. Included in Appendix B are three alternatives which would be aimed at satisfying not only Treasury Board requirements but also managerial budgetary control requirements for the effect of currency fluctuation on post expenditures. Alternative #1 may seem to be a drastic change … but it seems to be the most valid one at his point in time.

What was Alternative #1, the option they chose?

Integrate the system I developed independently into the larger Departmental Financial Management System (FMS).

What was the main advantage of this approach?

i) there would be no need for a [separate] Currency Fluctuation Reporting System.

This memorandum proved beyond any doubt that Richard Goneau, Dave Gordon and the Treasury Board knew how my system worked because I explained it to them in great detail in person and in writing. Three years later, Richard, the author of the currency fluctuation memorandum, speaking for the department, said under oath that the CFRS was dismantled because no one understood how it worked.

Richard: Like I said before, he did not need access to the computers to produce the currency fluctuation reports. I already told you that, and it is all his fault if today we cannot keep track of millions of dollars. It's his fault for getting himself fired! Because he got himself fired, we had to dismantle the Currency Fluctuation Reporting System because nobody knew how to run it. We even hired a consultant for $90,000.00 so he could tell the consultant how the system worked before we fired him.

Thomas W. Brown swallowed this outrageous and implausible testimony, this outrageous lie, hook, line and sinker and repeats this monstrous lie in finding me guilty of insubordination. I know you have read it before, but it bears repeating.

In fact, the consultant’s report was made without taking into account the required report under the currency fluctuation project and to this day the financial management system does not and cannot take into account “losses and gains” in currency fluctuations, it was hoped it would, had the consultant had in hand the griever’s report…

[Therefore] the griever’s misconduct at various periods during 1984 and 1985 has thus been established.

Decision of Thomas W. Brown in Bernard Payeur v. TREASURY BOARD (Foreign Affairs), p. 114.