After the eHealth Ontario spending scandal broke out, I thought it was just another one of those poorly managed government agencies with bad spending habits. I was curious about the latest audit report written by the auditor general and how news was saying it was a scathing report, so I decided to read it over. Oh my God after reading it, I am totally amused by the abusive power and how they can continue to run a bottomless money pit for years. On top of this, the level of incompetence is high and the strategy was dead wrong from the start. Even the auditor, which I’m pretty sure he’s not a techie himself, took a few direct swings at their idiocy of their IT strategy. I was literally laughing by the time I read that SSHA (Smart Systems for Health Agency) was trying build an entirely private high-speed network from scratch and that is disconnected from the internet. The operating cost is $200 million per year (out of the $300 mil this year) and the core network is already outdated, and, “approaching end of useful life” before there is any real application running on it. In auditor’s word, they’ve built a super highway with only a few cars running on it. The core network is also very unstable with outages lasting intermittently for as long as a 2-week period; imagine you are a practitioner who needs information quickly and that would be the worst nightmare for a patient.
Beyond the incompetency, the auditor also slammed hard on the abusive power that they had. The agency is literally run by consultants, where you have senior executives that are hired as consultants that has the power to hire more and more consultants working under consultants. The auditor pointed out that they had only 30 employees but employed over 300 consultants working in the ministry. If I can bill $300 per day working as a “consultant”, I’ll be happy to work for a few years and called it a retirement. The auditor did find out that a few consultants were able to hide behind the process and earned $2 million over just 7 years. Boy this IS my dream job.
Anyways, this whole mess sure sounds like a deliberate attempt to rake money out of the taxpayer’s money. In fact, the auditor general did comment in the report that he had trouble getting into the agency to perform a real audit. I’m actually a bit mad at Ontario for shafting us with new taxes after new taxes and claim victory. First it came the health tax that everyone has to pay and now we will have another tax revenue generating machine called HST coming next year.
If someone can tell me how to get a consulting job or how to find to an untendered contract at eHealth. I can keep dreaming.
PS: If you feel like getting a good laugh or want to get mad, you can read the lengthy report here.
