Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our guests for being here today. This is an important topic.
At the last meeting, I said that it seems as though, if you trip the wire of entering into the first levels of default prevention management, you begin the long process of circling the drain to ending up in third party management and you therefore never even get out of it. The last witness we had here talked about their tax bill. It started out at $214,000, and because the third party managers never paid it, it's now nearing $1 million. Because they don't control it, they can't even pay that tax bill if they want to, so there are definite problems here.
Would you propose a solution? Default management is in every government ministry. I know back home there is a county near my riding where the Ministry of Municipal Affairs stepped in and removed the entire county council and then starting managing that particular county because there were significant issues there. The basic policy is that if money is not being managed or if services are not being provided, those kinds of things, that is essentially a tripwire for any level of government.
Now you're saying that you don't have enough funding, and that definitely could be the case, or in your case, with one and a half people to manage $6 million, it could definitely be.
Would you agree with me that there should be some sort of accountability structure? I'll go back one step further to something I call the golden rule. The golden rule typically means to treat others as you would like to be treated. However, I like to say the golden rule is that he who holds the gold rules, essentially. When that happens, the person holding the gold is going to say, we're not appreciative of the way this is being managed and we're going to pull it back and put in a different method. That's what's happening here.
What would be your solution? The rules are always there for the anomaly, right? When everything is going well, everything is going well. When you enter into default management, you begin the long process of circling the drain.
What would you propose? We all have to admit that, at some point, if somebody is being fraudulent or something such as that, we have to take care of that. We need to take care of that. We're not saying that's always the case, but if that is the case, we need to be able to take care of the fraud that's happening there. One of the tripwires is that the auditor has flagged concerns about the financial statements, right? That could be flagged because he suspects that there is fraud. Rather than putting you into default management, what would your solution be to say, we suspect fraud in this particular area, so how do we bring that to light and find out where that fraud is taking place?
That rule is now happening and we have a whole bunch of communities falling into default management, not for fraud but for another thing. However, we still need a rule to deal with fraud.