Northern exposure

The Auditor General points out yet another element of DIAND's responsibility that's been mismanaged recently:

Nunavut continually violated federal and its own territorial laws by spending money that wasn't approved by the legislative assembly, says Ottawa's auditor general.

The territory has failed to put basic financial controls in place, making it vulnerable to mistakes, bad decisions and fraud, Sheila Fraser says in a report tabled on Tuesday.

The Nunavut government has more than 2,300 employees and $1 billion in assets, and spends more than $1 billion a year. Most of its funding comes from the federal government.

Yet some of the territory's accounting is done by hand rather than on a computer, said the report.

It's fair enough that Nunavut thus far doesn't have many professionals (including accountants) to make sure that its accounts are up to the standards expected in the rest of the country. But even so, it speaks poorly of Ottawa's management of an area within its responsibility that there hasn't been any support in place to help pick up the slack. And now that the weaknesses are publicly known, there's all the more urgency to fix the problems before the system gets misused.