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"Crime and Punishment" written at McGill by the Chief Internal Auditor and published by the Principal Heather Munroe-Blum

Below is my request for publishing reports from recent internal audits at McGill that was addressed to the Principal Heather Munroe-Blum during her Town Hall meeting in November 26, 2007.

I have one question to you (Heather Munroe-Blum) about a secretly written McGill book - "Crime and Punishment" - which I would like to see published asap. I have seen some fragments of it and I was really impressed. Dostoyevski’s famous version is belittled when compared with McGill's approach. Instead of reading one person's moral dilemma before and after committing a crime we see a summarization of many financial crimes committed by some 7000 academics and staff members. Very interesting are also their peculiar punishments that until now are kept secret.

I am talking about a famous Internal Audit campaign involving many external investigators costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the last 2-3 years they were checking many accounts and P-card records. Of course, they revealed many irregularities and bad things. People are only people and some from us who were not able to award themselves good salaries were trying to combine McGill resources with their personal expenses.

My point is that the used methods for typical financial irregularities as punishments are not transparent. For example, the people already nailed with small or big irregularities were asked to inform about other co-workers and not talk about the methods used that exposed their problems. Later, some results of auditing were used for administrative changes at high positions, which without collecting some data gathered by the auditors would be more difficult to impose. In this way, instead of sending a clear message to our community about the importance of having clean books we see terrorized academic and staff members. This McGill version of "Crime and Punishment" must be published soon and I am asking for it the Principal as the main publisher of this still secret book. According to the diagram at: http://www.mcgill.ca/internalaudit/about/structures/“The Chief Auditor may, at his or her discretion, seek the counsel, advice, and guidance of the Principal”.

P.S.

It was good that the Principal presented her opinion about my suggestion in this way: “Yes, I agree that such a “book” could be great after publishing”. However, questionable was her comment that so far she is very satisfied with all internal reports presented to her and the BoG by the Internal Audit Department. It means that there is no plan to inform our community even succintly about this book.

Slawomir Poplawski