Alberta government changes expense disclosure policy, removes eight years of records

Yahoo

2 days ago

While many Albertans were preparing for a long weekend last Friday, the provincial government published changes to its rules for disclosing expense claims made by senior officials.
The new policy, published Aug. 1, removes a requirement that the premier, ministers, deputy ministers and senior staff must publicly disclose receipts for expenses over $100.
In keeping with a new provision introduced in the policy that published expense reports be available for five years, the government also removed eight years of expense reports that were previously available on its website.
Marisa Breeze, press secretary to Finance Minister Nate Horner, said in a statement that the changes were made to "improve government operations and reduce red tape," and to bring Alberta's policies into alignment with other provinces.
"Our government remains committed to the highest transparency and accountability standards."
Not everyone agrees.
"All of these changes diminish transparency," said a statement from Information and Privacy Commissioner Diane McLeod.
"Our office has no knowledge of the rationale for the changes."
James Turk, executive director of Toronto Metropolitan University's Centre for Free Expression, said the new policy was clearly "lowering" existing standards.
"There should be very limited restrictions on what the public has a right to know."
Years of expense reports no longer available
The previous policy, dated April 30, 2020, applied to a wide range of government positions, from cabinet members to executive managers. Public disclosure of receipts was required only for the premier, ministers, associate ministers and political staff.
According to Treasury Board and Finance, receipts are still required to be provided when claiming expenses, but they will no longer be made public.
Before being published, receipts and invoices were required to be redacted to protect personal information.
The expense reports can be viewed on the government's website, and are also available for download as a dataset.
In the first five months of 2025, there are more than two dozen expense claims over $100 for Premier Danielle Smith personally, as well as more than 200 for ministers and nearly 300 for chiefs of staff. Under the new policy, those receipts will no longer be publicly disclosed.
A newly added provision in the policy states that published expense reports "must remain publicly accessible online for five years after its publication."
The previous policy did not have any minimum time frame. According to a copy of the dataset downloaded by CBC News prior to the changes, the available records previously went back to 2012.
However, the data now begins in 2020, with eight years of expense reports having been removed from public view.
The dataset that was available until recently had about 600,000 entries, with each entry being an expense claim by a government employee or official. The current dataset has approximately 100,000 entries.
In other words, roughly half a million expense claims spanning eight years have been removed.
"It sounds like they're assuring they'll be there for five years, but in fact they've been there historically longer," said Turk. "The net result is that the five years is a maximum. So there's going to be much less access to records than there was under the previous [policy]."
According to Breeze, the data was removed to enhance "system performance, as the volume of data hosted on the public site currently exceeds the tools capacity to efficiently download and process it," as well as "to be consistent with the public disclosure of salary and severance under Public Sector Compensation Transparency Act."
However, the regulations for that legislation describe the five-year disclosure period as a minimum, not a maximum. Breeze did not answer questions to clarify how the changes relate to that legislation.
Reaction from opposition, auditor general
"It's absolutely shameful," said Christina Gray, house leader of the Alberta NDP.
"No longer requiring [disclosure of] receipts is a way of obfuscating or hiding. It's a way to hide what's actually being spent and what's happening in a way that I know Albertans would not support.
"At the same time, the government scrubbing eight years of records limits the ability to compare this government spending to previous governments."
Gray drew a contrast between Premier Danielle Smith's expressions of support for increased government transparency while in opposition and actions taken by her government, including a recent rewrite of access to information legislation that many experts — including McLeod and Turk — viewed as reducing transparency.
"Here we see these changes being made on a Friday before a long weekend with absolutely no notice, no disclosure — and these rules are not something that change often, so a deliberate choice was made," said Gray.
The Office of the Auditor General provided a statement saying they aren't able "to provide any context for the changes, as our officer was not consulted or informed about the rationale behind them."
Policies vary across Canada
The Alberta legislature has its own disclosure rules that apply to all MLAs, separate from expenses while performing government business. Members' expenses are posted online within 30 days of the end of each quarter. Those public disclosures include receipts, except for expense categories that are capped or are counted by a non-financial unit, such as kilometres or days.
Outside Alberta, the rules around government expense disclosures vary by province.
Ontario requires disclosure within 90 days of approval of an expense claim, and the information must remain publicly available for at least two years. However, receipts are not published.
In British Columbia, travel expenses are published quarterly for ministers and monthly for deputy ministers, and receipts of ministers are publicly disclosed.
Turk said Alberta should seek to be a leader in transparency standards rather than weakening its rules to match those of other jurisdictions.
"In other words, we don't want provinces going to the lowest common denominator," he said.