Here's part of his report:
Life in Ontario can be a crapshoot, whether you win a $42-million jackpot because of a slot machine software glitch or pay property taxes that are too high or too low because of botched assessments, says the latest report from Ontario Auditor General Jim McCarter.
He also found emergency room wait times can push 12 hours instead of the 8-hour target and it’s all but impossible to get through on the toll-free line to the provincial office handling child support payments.
The 477-page report reads like a greatest hits of problems at agencies and institutions that have been trouble for governments of all stripes, including the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation and the Family Responsibility Office (FRO), to name a few.
Two $42-million slot machine prizes have been won in the last two years – one at Georgian Downs in Barrie – because of malfunctions in machines that are legally prevented from paying out more than $40,000 and $300 respectively.
The winners’ glee was fleeting, however, because the law does not require OLG to make such payouts – but McCarter notes misunderstandings could be avoided if the lottery corporation would post maximum prizes.
Property taxes have also had a casino element thanks to “substantial” variations between MPAC’s assessments and actual resale prices on homes, McCarter found.
One house assessed at $874,000 in 2008 had sold for $2.1 million two months previously, a difference of 140 per cent, meaning the new owner would be wildly under-taxed. In another case, a house assessed at $330,000 in 2008 sold for $100,000 six months later, a difference of 70 per cent.
Overall, the selling price of one in eight of 11,500 homes sampled across the province differed from the market-value assessment by more than 20 per cent because MPAC didn’t have up-to-date information.
“It will be of little solace to property owners who are over-assessed relative to neighboring properties, and therefore pay more than their fair share of tax, to know that the system got it right for many of their neighbours but not for them,” said McCarter.
He recommended MPAC set a threshold above which differences in sale price and assessed value must be investigated within a “reasonable period of time.”
Aside from long emergency room waits, most typically in serious cases, the auditor found delays in triaging patients.
Fifteen minutes is the national standard for arriving patients to be assessed by a nurse – a process known as triage – but at three hospitals audited in the GTA some patients waited more than an hour. The hospitals were Scarborough General, Hamilton General and Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket.
In half the cases, “triage nurses underestimated the severity of the patient’s injury or illness,” the report said.
McCarter found continuing and serious glitches at the Family Responsibility Office, where 80 per cent of callers seeking help on child support issues could not reach a staffer because of heavy call volumes.
“It continues to struggle with some of the same problems we raised in our 2003 annual report, including not having adequate systems and procedures in place to ensure quick action is taken when payers are in arrears on their obligations,” McCarter wrote.
When parents cannot get support they’re entitled to they often wind up on welfare, he added, calling for a “more results-oriented culture” at the agency and a new phone system to makes sure all calls are answered in “a reasonable time.”
The report also raised the possibility that political considerations played a role in which infrastructure projects such as hockey arenas were funded as the federal and Ontario governments embarked a plan to spend $8 billion to keep the economy rolling in the wake of the devastating 2008 recession.
For example, of more than 700 recommended Recreational Infrastructure Canada Program project applications, 153 were removed and replaced by 203 other applications “with no written justification as to why.”
“This lack of transparency to support the decisions made heightens the risk that the ministry (energy and infrastructure) would be unable to demonstrate that the selection process was open and fair and that political considerations did not come into play.”
Tight deadline for approving infrastructure projects result in lightning quick decisions, with 56 applications worth $585 million assessed in just four hours. No details were given on the projects
“This haste without technical expertise made it virtually impossible, in our view, to properly conduct the necessary review work,” the auditor wrote.
The auditor also slammed the government for allowing businesses and institutions to get away with a poor job of recycling – with the sectors generating about 60 per cent of the province’s garbage but diverting only 12 per cent of it from landfills.
This is despite regulations requiring large generators of industrial waste to separate re-usable or recyclable materials from garbage, added McCarter, noting “the ministry (of environment) has little assurance that the regulations are being complied with.”
There is also room for improvement in municipal curbside recycling programs, with the rate of diverting items from landfills ranging from just 20 per cent in some municipalities to over 60 per cent in others.
After spending $50 million annually over the last three years to fight school bullying, the education ministry has no idea if the money is “reducing physical and psychological aggression in our schools” because no measurement tools have been developed, the auditor found.
Highlights of Ontario auditor general’s annual report
Some highlights from the Ontario auditor general’s annual report:
• Half of the $3.1 billion in federal-provincial infrastructure stimulus funding was awarded to projects that were not shovel-ready as required.
• More than 50,000 people spent too long in hospital last year because of the time it took to line up post-discharge care for them.
• Emergency room wait times are still too long, often because of a delay in finding in-patient beds even when beds are available.
• People in need of home care get varying levels of services depending on where they live because of outdated funding models.
• Organ donor cards carried in your wallet are virtually meaningless and not acceptable criteria for consent to donate.
• The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation is off by more than 20 per cent of the actual price in one out of every eight homes, meaning people are paying too much or too little property tax.
• The agency that collects and distributes court ordered support payments handles only 20-to-25 per cent of its total cases in any given year, leaving vulnerable families without the money they are owed.
• There is $70 million in “critical” repair work needed at Ontario’s 24 colleges next year, and the province needs to double the $40 million it spends annually to maintain the aging post-secondary institutions.
- The Canadian Press
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