Hydro power lines in Ontario
Once again the high cost of so-called ‘green’ policies turns out to be politically embarrassing, and attempts to hide the true facts seem to have made things much worse.
As Ontarians head to the polls in June, voters have to make sense of two competing versions of their province’s bottom line: The Auditor-General’s and the Kathleen Wynne government’s, reports Toronto’s Globe and Mail.
Matthew McClearn investigates how creative accounting in hydro revenue made their math so different.
In March last year, Kim Marshall called and left a message for Bonnie Lysyk, Ontario’s Auditor-General. Ms. Marshall was the chief financial officer of the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), the agency that manages the province’s electrical system and acts as an intermediary between power generators and consumers. The IESO had just made a big change to its accounting practices, and Ms. Marshall said she wanted to give the Auditor-General a “heads up.”
Ms. Lysyk was already well aware of the change. She and her staff had found the IESO’s latest financial statements online. Poring over them in their downtown Toronto office, they found a terse footnote describing the new accounting policy.
“And my staff go, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” Ms. Lysyk told The Globe and Mail. “You’re not supposed to do this.”
Ms. Lysyk believed the IESO’s new practice – a method known as rate-regulated accounting – violated government accounting standards. What she didn’t know was that it represented a radical departure in how the government of Premier Kathleen Wynne – not just the IESO – planned to disclose its future borrowing activities to the public.
Continued here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
April 23, 2018 at 08:09AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 