Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug 21/00) - First Nations are feeling federal wrath in the form of funding holdbacks for failing to complete annual audits.

It's a national problem, and in the NWT more than half of the First Nations have had funding that goes to pay for band administration withheld.

The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) is enforcing strict accountability on First Nations to produce year-end audits, complete with disclosure of band office salaries.

"Every First Nations and organization that receive funding from our office, must produce the annual audit," said DIAND spokesperson Stephen Outhouse.

Those audits, for the fiscal year ending March 31, must be submitted to DIAND by June 30.

"What's sort of new about it this year, is we are enforcing our policy very vigilantly and uniformly across the country," he said. "We're definitely implementing our policy, which is, if we don't have that audit, we withhold discretionary funding until we do receive that audit."

Outhouse said that First Nations will continue to receive funding for essential services like health and education.

"Discretionary funding is any funding that is transferred to First Nations that doesn't go to essential services," he said. "Funding for band offices and salaries and things like that."

Also new to this year's audit requirement is a detailed list of salaries, honoraria and travel expenses paid out by the band.

"We are asking for a schedule of salaries from all the First Nations; how much their elected officials make," he said. "In the past, we only requested this information from First Nations that were in deficit situations; this year we're requested it from everybody."

As of last week, DIAND had received 14 of 17 audits from Yukon, he said.

"The NWT was a bit different; they were at 17 of 38," he said. "We did receive more than 17, but the 17 did meet our requirements."

He said some of the audits were rejected because they did not include the information requested on salaries.