Annual Report 2021

Message from the Inspector General 

As they say, with every challenge comes an opportunity. Never was this truer than in 2021, a year that required gruelling resilience, yet also allowed our teams to demonstrate the extent of their abilities to innovate and adapt. These are key values for any organization and I’m proud to see them reflected in our Office of Inspector General members, as demonstrated in this report.

First and foremost, it should be noted that this past year, the OIG reached a major milestone as it reviewed its 1,000th denunciation since its foundation in 2014. Although whistleblower reports remain our biggest source of information, our on-site monitoring and surveillance work has once again been a testament to our team’s enormous adaptation abilities as they carry out their role as a watchdog over the integrity of contract award and performance at Ville de Montréal.

As such, a variety of projects – such as demolition debris management, parks development, and the Office municipal de l’habitation de Montréal housing renovations – have been subject to inspections, document reviews and witness interviews. We also published a background report on the legal compliance of the Société de transport de Montréal’s practices with respect to contractual amendments.

Work on contract integrity is still ongoing. As evidenced by the various fraud strategies uncovered by public reports, new, more subtle and sophisticated tricks crop up every year. As such, we cannot afford to let our guard down, especially since Ville de Montréal is the second-largest provider of work in Quebec.

Our training and prevention team is working tirelessly to add to and update their presentations based on what they learn from our most recent reports. Like our prevention newsletters, these training sessions are tailored and adapted to the concrete reality of Ville de Montréal and its related organizations. As a clear sign of its success, the Office’s training program surpassed the 10,000-participant mark in 2021.

Collusion, corruption, fraud and other acts of contractual delinquency generally occur in the shadows, behind closed doors. Our ultimate weapon against these wrongdoings remains the effective and efficient collection, organization and transmission of information. As such, I must acknowledge the valuable contribution of our partner organizations, which, through the coordination committee we established in 2018, led to the development of promising initiatives for our analysis, investigation, training and legal teams.

In closing, I would like to thank all the members of our Office. Every day, they find new ways to use their rich and diverse professional experiences to benefit Montréal taxpayers, as many of them have had previous careers in fields as diverse as law enforcement, law, engineering, IT and education. Their unwavering dedication to upholding exemplary contracting practices at Ville de Montréal has made the Office of the Inspector General a leader in the world of anti-corruption and integrity.