Province will review hiring of all public sector employees after improper findings

The Manitoba government will examine the hiring practices of the entire public sector after an investigation found civil servants were improperly hired, their compensation kept private and they may have circumvented tax rules.

The audit, released publicly Thursday, found five people received contract work when the positions should have been filled by qualified public servants.

The review discovered that payments to external agencies of $222,000 in 2015-16 and $81,000 in 2016-17 were not publicly disclosed, and conflict of interest declarations were sometimes never obtained

"People were hired who shouldn't have been hired," Manitoba premier Brian Pallister said at a news conference, decrying the "culture of cover-up" that he said kept these occurrences private.

"That is a serious, serious departure from the rules that all of us should expect will be upheld in our civil service."

The province initiated the hiring review of all government departments after discovering a number of concerning employment agreements, a news release stated. 

The review examined agreements in 2015 and early 2016, when the NDP was still in power.

We're going to go deeper across government and find out if this is an approach that has been taken by other agencies.- Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister

The audit found a number of cases where a person was employed through a corporate structure outside Manitoba, Pallister said.

Province may be found liable

"This opens up our government to the possibility of [being] found guilty of aiding and abetting tax avoidance schemes," the premier said. "We can't have it, so that's why we're going to go deeper across government and find out if this is an approach that has been taken by other agencies." 

Pallister said there is no timeline for when the expanded audit would be concluded.

Asked if the improper practices the audit discovered smacked of political favouritism, Pallister said he wasn't making that allegation. The people were not hired for roles as political staffers, he said. 

Most of the flagged employment arrangements involved the former Family Services department, he added.

The NDP said these accusations are rich coming from a premier who initially failed to pay taxes on his Costa Rica vacation home.

"It is unfortunate the premier is choosing to make baseless insinuations against dedicated civil servants, instead of strengthening services," finance critic Matt Wiebe said in a statement. "He fired over a thousand civil servants, while freezing their wages, and impugning them at every opportunity."