Someone who works for the city stole $18,800 worth of merchandise
The annual fraud and waste hotline report found that investigators were unable to locate packages that went missing from mailrooms
Nearly 700 complaints were made to the city’s fraud and waste tip line last year, and Toronto’s auditor general has shared some of the highlights in her recent fraud hotline report.
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According to CBC’s analysis of the report, the most common complaints submitted to the anonymous hotline involved subsidy fraud, irregular benefit claims and time theft—one employee was found to have conducted business for their side hustle on company time, and another collected three weeks of sick pay while working elsewhere.
“Wrongdoing perpetrated in the workplace can damage employee morale and can negatively impact the organization’s reputation,” auditor general Tara Anderson wrote in the report, which was presented to the city’s audit committee last week.
There’s one mysterious case the city’s investigators were unable to solve. A tip led to the discovery that $21,100 worth of packages had vanished from city mailrooms over a two-year period. More than 20 missing packages contained electronic devices, according to the report. One former employee was found to have stolen three of those packages, totalling about $2,300, but the city was unable to locate the remaining $18,800 in merchandise.
The city has reportedly implemented new checkpoints to prevent unauthorized access going forward.
Related: A GTA police officer is accused of trafficking official police uniforms
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
