It's that time of the year again --- 'mea culpa'

"Should Canadian taxpayers be on the hook for co-ordinator's inflated $348,661 salary?"

Those words appeared here in the title of a post written last week, and even though they were not meant to be an inference, they were still wrong. Plain and simple. Vaughn Blaney, the co-ordinator who was referenced, did not acrue a $348,661 dollar salary as mentioned in the post and my apologies go out to him for alleging that he may have accepted it.

It was predicted, based on sources who turned out to be wrong, that he [Blaney] might have received such a salary. Moreover, the sources were not in line with the common practice of accounting which has gone on for years at Public Accounts of Canada. Though the payment was reflected in one line beside the recipients name, in this case Blaney, there is absolutely no evidence to speak of that he accepted the entire amount. As he said in his defense, the full amount was allocated to such things as staff hirings, office space, equipment, etc. and was not just his personal salary.

While the Public Accounts of Canada catalog all payments in excess of $100,000 from programs such as Professional and Special Services for DND, the payments reflected in the one line are not an accurate accounting breakdown. My beef should never have been with Mr. Blaney instead it should have been with the lack of transparency at Public Accounts. IMHO, the accountability of parliament is placed in dire jeoparty if this is the way that money is reported or summarized. It makes you wonder why the government even bothers to put these Public Accounts online if they can't be accurately scrutinized by the taxpayers whose money is used to fund such programs. But that is an arguement for another day.

Again, my apologies go out to Mr. Blaney.