Thank you, Mr. Chair. I understand the reason for this bill and for the most part I reluctantly agree with forgiving some of these dollars.
There’s one area that I have a big problem with and that is there’s three debts in here that arose out of fraudulent activities against the GNWT. Specifically, people stole from the GNWT and they were given an order by the courts to pay back the GNWT a certain amount of money. Now, for some reason, we have failed to collect that money and the time is such that now they’re statute barred, which means it’s kind of impossible to collect the money. As a result we’re out about $50,000 that we could have collected from people who stole from us and it kind of rots my socks that we’re going to forgive these dollars.
Unfortunately, they are statute barred, which means we can’t do anything. But I think it’s important that we learn from this particular case. People do, from time to time, steal from the Government of the Northwest Territories and when they do steal from the Government of the Northwest Territories, there’s no reason that we should ever, especially when an order from the court has been given, ever let them get away with not paying back what they owe. If we don’t have policies and procedures to track these individuals so that we make sure that we’re on top of them from the minute an order is given until all the monies are collected, we should put those in place to make sure that when people do steal from us and are ordered to pay us back, that we’re on top of it and we collect the money.
So to the Minister today, I would like to seek some commitment from the Minister that some protocols or rules will be put in place to ensure that we never see a situation where we’re writing off debt or forgiving debt for individuals who have stolen from us. So to the Minister, will the Minister commit to putting in some policies, procedures to make sure that we track the dollars from individuals who have stole from us? In this case, three people are getting away with over $50,000 in what they owe us and, quite frankly, it’s unacceptable. We need to make sure it never happens again. Will the Minister commit to that?