Shocking AG report out of Toronto details duplicity and indifference
Christie Blatchford
National Post
06 July 2018
A shocking report by the City of Toronto’s Auditor-General paints an
“alarming” picture of how private firm duplicity and galling
bureaucratic indifference allowed the city to put at risk the safety of
employees, firefighters and visitors to thousands of city buildings
such as City Hall, Metro Hall, Union Station, daycares, long-term care
homes and recreation centres.
Dated June 28, the 114-page report is the result of a fraud
investigation AG Beverly Romeo-Beehler started last summer when a
complainant called the city’s fraud and waste hotline.
Though the probe began as a fraud investigation, because it involves
what are called “life safety” systems – sprinklers, fire alarms and
extinguishers, emergency lighting and the like – it was more critical
than most.
The report goes to the city’s audit committee next week, and, depending
what happens there, perhaps to city council later this month.
Toronto Mayor John Tory, in a furious note to audit committee chair
Stephen Holyday Friday, urged the committee to accept all the AG’s
recommendations and said “I trust Toronto Police…have been duly
notified of the issues uncovered by this investigation.”
Ironically, while the AG found many red flag indications of fraud –
chiefly, shifting company names, fake bids for city tenders and
$900,000 worth of city contracts signed by non-existent people — and
believes, “based on the totality of the evidence” that there is “a
high-risk situation for fraud”, she couldn’t prove it because of the
lack of an audit trail and missing documentation.
Tory described his “utter disappointment” at Romeo-Beehler’s findings
and called the lack of co-operation from some city staff as “quite
simply…a disgrace.”
The report was distributed in committee agendas Friday.
It is particularly devastating because even after Romeo-Beehler’s probe
started, and as late as this February when it was drawing to a close,
senior officials with the city’s Facilities Management division failed
to report suspected wrongdoing to her, even when specifically told to
do so by Deputy Fire Chief Jim Jessop.
While the Auditor-General has jurisdiction over city buildings – they
number, she said, in the thousands, and include some of Toronto’s most
hallowed “civic spaces” — she has no authority over private ones.
Thus, she forwarded the full complaint to Toronto Fire, where Fire
Chief Matthew Pegg immediately delegated Jessop to investigate the
situation in the private sector, where condominiums, schools, hospitals
and daycares rely on private firms, including the suspect one, for
critical safety inspections.
Though Romeo-Beehler doesn’t say the Facilities Management bureaucrats
actively thwarted her investigation, she certainly suggests it, once
noting “although we normally receive full co-operation from city staff,
this time we had significant challenges…”
She called the lack of co-operation, though confined to unidentified
“certain members” of the leadership team, nonetheless “deeply
concerning”.
The AG went so far as to point to the investigation into the deadly
Grenfell Tower fire in London, England, where a report afterwards
pointed to a triad of state failures – ignorance of regulations;
indifference to concerns raised by others, and lack of clarity on roles
and responsibilities – as the key reasons for the lethal system failure
there.
“All three themes were evident during our investigation,” Romeo-Beehler
wrote. “And it is these cultural issues that resonated with us.”
Seventy-two people died in the June, 2017 Grenfell fire, a social housing project.
The AG believes, as she wrote, that the whopping failure in Toronto
lies at the feet of the private firm and “mismanagement by the city”.
The original whistleblower allegations were that the company, York Fire
Protection (and its two associated firms, Advance Fire Control, which
also did work for the city, and Advanced Detection Technologies Corp.,
which very nearly did), was routinely submitting falsified inspection
reports, forging signatures and using false identities and stock
photographs of non-existent people as signatories to city contracts.
Rauf Ahmad, also known as Rauf Arain, is the person identified by the
AG as being “at the centre” of both York Fire and Advance Fire Control,
and a director at Advanced Detection.
Stunningly, Advanced Detection was a successful bidder in May of this
year for a two-year contract for inspection, maintenance and repairs to
city-run shelters – despite the ongoing probe and Ahmad’s by then
well-documented failures.
A Facilities Management staffer actually wrote city purchasing that the
department “has no issue” with any of the successful bidders, including
Advanced Detection.
That same month, Toronto Fire laid 58 Fire Code charges against York
Fire, Advanced Detection, Ahmad and various others associated with the
companies.
Only then, it appears from Romeo-Beehler’s report, did the contract with Advanced Detection actually stall.
Despite a decade-long track record of concerns, she said, “the city
kept awarding contracts to the vendors and companies associated with
Rauf Ahmad …
“Although the Facilities Management Division may not have known the
full extent of the vendor’s duplicitousness, management was aware, over
an extended period of time through staff complaints, that these vendors
had serious billing irregularities and unsatisfactory performance…,”
she said.
But “most concerning” is the lack of action taken by Facilities
Management to make sure inspections were actually being done and “that
the buildings were safe.”
Toronto Fire and the AG worked together to inspect a sample of 19
critical infrastructure buildings; “the majority did not pass”.
Throughout, Romeo-Beehler said, senior management “insisted the work
was essentially completed and there was a need to trust the vendor.”
An additional concern she raised is that “disreputable companies” like
Ahmad’s – with no background checks, no paper trail to show work was
being done, and fictitious employees — “will have extensive access to
city-owned buildings” and could pose a security risk.
As for Ahmad, the AG said that after being shown all her evidence, “and
after intense questioning under oath”, he admitted that the person
identified as “senior fire engineer” and contract signatory David
Daniels is not a real person, and that at least “five other identities”
associated with one or another of his companies aren’t real, either.
And, in a perfect modern touch, Ahmad explained that he used different
names, which he called AKAs, because he wanted to avoid racial
discrimination.
But Ahmad went further, as the AG said: “He created fake company
histories, false professional qualifications for fake people, and he
bid on the same RFQ (Request For Quotation) using his own name on one
bid and a fake identity on another bid.”
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