February 17, 2003
It was in February 2000 that Toronto City Hall employee Jeff Goodall first discovered that the city finance department was sitting on tenants’ cheques in amounts of up to $1 million for months at a time.
Goodall, a clerk in the banking section responsible for preparing bank deposits and making related entries into the accounting system, had worked for the city for 25 years. He also happened to be a columnist for Toronto Free Press (TFP).
…"To this day, I receive cheques that have been sat on for so long that they are stale-dated or almost so," said Goodall. "This is not just a matter of one or two cheques, it is quite literally dozens of them.
"I have been sent as many as five monthly cheques from new tenants, often with letters or notes asking us to please deposit the cheques which they have already sent, With our tight money situation, it seems unconscionable that we could hold onto cheques for so long, and what if a disgruntled tenant tells the media that we are not cashing cheques for months at a time…individual cheques in amounts up to $1 million are regularly sat on for anything for a few days to a month or two. I deposit cheques over $50,000 promptly on receipt, but this is of little use if it takes so long for the cheque to be forwarded from the department receiving it."
These are exactly the words Goodall wrote in a letter to his boss Wanda Liczyk, the city’s treasurer and Chief Financial Officer. Liczyk is the same bureaucrat who was at the helm when leasing arrangements were made with MFP Financial for a $43 million deal that ballooned to $80 million, now the subject of an expensive judicial inquiry.
Goodall worried that blowing the whistle would bring trouble on his head. Mayor Mel Lastman held Liczyk, who came to Toronto from North York with amalgamation, in high esteem.
"I am afraid of repercussions, but I am quite frankly sick and tired of the incomplete or inefficient directions that we receive, and of the callous and uncaring treatment to which the staff of the Finance Department Accounting Division are being subjected," Goodall wrote in a May, 2000 TFP regular column.
In fact, Goodall decided to go public with his complaints about improprieties in the finance department when it became clear that Liczyk would not be responding to his original letter of complaint.
"I am now going public as I believe that the taxpayers have a right to know how some of the potential gains from amalgamation are being squandered or jeopardized by inattention at best, and outright incompetence at worst," Goodall wrote.
It didn’t take long for the repercussions to hit.
It was in the May 9 issue of TFP that Goodall had written about the stale-dated cheques and the lack of response in his letter about them from Liczyk. The second story in Goodall’s planned series was scheduled to be published on May 30. But by 10 a.m. of that morning, Goodall, after more than 20 year’s service to Toronto City Hall, was called before a disciplinary committee who summarily fired him.
All calls to Mayor Lastman and councillors by Goodall and by editor Judi McLeod were patently ignored.
One year later, following up on a tip by a city hall insider, TFP discovered that the stale-dated cheques and the computer leasing scandal are only the tip of the iceberg at Toronto City Hall.
The same senior city staff, who recommended the controversial multimillion lease deal for computers with MFP Financial cost local taxpayers an additional $43 million for a questionable telephone deal they recommended to city council.
"The city’s former information technology director Jim Andrews, responsible, among others, for the computer lease scandal, was responsible for another fiscal fiasco waiting to be uncovered--the city’s telephone scandal," wrote TFP.
A Mitel telephone system had been in place at city hall for 10 years. Independent information technology experts and city hall staff say the system had been entirely upgraded at a cost of one million dollars, and was the most advanced system available, when Andrews recommended a $5 million switch over to a Bell system in 1999.
The key to the figures in this financial fiasco is that taxpayers must pay ongoing operating costs for the life of the system–estimated to be $43 million over five years.
There are similarities between the computer and telephone deals. According to witnesses at the public inquiry into the computer lease deal, MFP knew the deal was in the bag before the contract was actually signed.
City staff concerned about the telephone contract say that someone had started ripping out the cable before a decision for the new telephone system was even made.
"Some councillors knew for sure but looked the other way," said one staffer.
As far as is known no other media ever picked up Goodall’s story or the telephone system fiasco.
Meanwhile, the $15 million taxpayer paid public inquiry probing the computer scandal has thus far provided only titillating tidbits such as an e-mail from Liczyk’s assistant, dated May 6, 1999, reminding her of "HaircutwDash" for 7 p.m., at Fiorio’s salon on St. Clair Ave. W.
Including the mayor, there are 44 city councillors holding seats at Toronto City Hall. That the compute deal went down--"without (as the mainline media repeatedly report) council knowledge or approval"--is a joke to some understandably cynical taxpayers.
Jeff Goodall, who paid with his job, was flagging councillors about improprieties in the finance department as far back as February 2000.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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