Waste in government out of control. News at 11

Yet another hilarious example of government waste, this time from Natural Resources Canada. Apparently its wireless and mobile communications spending is way out of control. The CBC is reporting on a recent audit which has discovered that the lack of oversight in this government agency is so bad that they could not even provide an inventory of all the BlackBerries and mobile phones they own. This one department is costing taxpayers half a million dollars per year. Multiply that by dozens more government departments, and that’s one huge hell of a waste.

Among the particulars of this audit that I find so amusing: employees made their own contracts with the phone companies, resulting in a patchwork of over 1500 individual contracts, 20% of all the devices were owned by people who had no reason for owning one in their job, and the department in question had no procedures to recover the cost when an employee used a government-provided mobile device for personal matters.

This is a perfect example of what happens when laws and government policies are too slow to catch up to actual practice. It’s a shame that an audit—probably costing the taxpayers the equivalent of a year of wireless services for Natural Resources Canada—had to be conducted as the first step on the road (hopefully) to eliminating some of this waste. No surprises here, and I bet that nobody’s going to raise the issue in today’s Question Period because they’ll be too busy benefitting from government waste elsewhere.