Initial thoughts on the Gomery report

Despite Gomery's exoneration of Paul Martin, certain factions are still pointing fingers at him, saying that, as Minister of Finance at the time, he should have known what was being done with the money.

This is the position that I expected from those factions, given their previous track record, but I don't think it's a reasonable expectation. Federal expenditures are over $100 billion, according to the first Google search result, and I don't think it's reasonable for one person to know where every dollar actually goes.

I've never been in charge of people, and the most money I've ever been in charge of professionally is a cash register with a $100 float, but here's the impression I get taking what I know about public sector finance, adding logic, mixing thoroughly, and baking at 350 for 30 minutes.

I think it is reasonable to expect the Minister of Finance to know (or be able to look up) to which cost centres every dollar is allocated. That is essentially his job.

I also think it is reasonable to expect the Minister of Finance to be aware of any anomalies found by any audits that may have been conducted (at least on a "Yes, I heard about that, let me check my records and I can give you more details" basis), and to take action to correct said anomalies.

It may or may not be reasonable to expect every dollar of every year's expenditure to be audited. I have no idea what audit standards are like or how complex a process it is, so I'm not going to presume.

However, I do not think it is reasonable to expect that the Minister of Finance would be aware that and where and how and what quantity of funds are being misappropriated.

Why? Two reasons:

1. If you were misappropriating funds for personal gain, wouldn't you take every measure to avoid tipping off the person ultimately responsible for allocating funds?

2. If you were misappropriating funds on behalf of a political party, wouldn't you want as many people in that party as possible to have plausible deniability? And what better plausible deniability is there than actually not knowing?

There could have been no benefit to the Minister of Finance knowing that funds were being misappropriated, but there could have been several benefits to him not being aware of it at all. Therefore, if the miscreants had any sense, they would have taken every measure to prevent him from finding out, perhaps even to cover it up. Since keeping perfect track of $100 billion worth of even perfectly transparent spending is rather a tall order for one person, I don't think he should be held cupable for not being immediately aware that maybe 0.1% of that amount was not accounted for.