More questions asked as Charlottetown councillors keep lid on forensic audit

The report from a forensic audit examining financial concerns at Charlottetown City Hall would already be in the hands of city residents if it had concluded there was nothing wrong, contends one former councillor.

"If the audit report completely vindicated the council and the city with respect to all the observations that Mr. [Scott] Messervey made, the report would have been released long ago," said David MacDonald, who spent eight years as a Charlottetown councillor and now works as a private investigator.

Messervey, a chartered professional accountant and the city's former deputy chief administrative officer, sent a list of 18 concerns to councillors in January 2019.

At the time, Messervey told council he had been fired by his boss, the city's former CAO Peter Kelly, in retaliation for raising the concerns. Kelly denied the assertion.

Within weeks, councillors voted to take no further action on the matter. But after details from Messervey's letter became public last spring, the Charlottetown council first fired Kelly without cause, then commissioned a forensic audit from the firm BDO Canada.

City Hall hasn't said how much the BDO audit cost, but Mayor Philip Brown has made it clear the number will reach six figures. Some councillors have pegged the cost at about $300,000.

The report from that audit was delivered to council on Feb. 6, but still has not been made public.

At first, Brown said the city was "getting our legal counsel to look at [the report] and then we'll be back at it again to hopefully release it in the next few days or within a week."

At the time, Brown said there was a need to determine "the potential for any legal liabilities against the city from an individual [or] from a corporation."

This week, a city spokesperson told CBC News it will be another two weeks before the audit report will be released, in some form.

"The BDO report is still under review by our legal counsel and we hope to bring this matter back before council within the next two weeks," the spokesperson said via email. "The matter before us pertains predominantly to our obligations to [the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act]."

Councillors have spent hours in closed-door sessions discussing what to do with the forensic audit, starting even before the city had received the report.

Duff Conacher, a former law professor and co-founder of the group Democracy Watch, said P.E.I. should have legislation that would compel municipal councillors to release the report of any audit, similar to the way reports from the provincial auditor general are made public.