The following is a guest post from Dale Leier. Dale is the Chief Revenue Officer for DPL Consulting in Surrey, B.C.

If you’ve ever wondered why nobody wants talk about the elephant in the room, just consider their appearance. Elephants are big and chunky, not slim and svelte. They have disproportionate features with tremendous ears and tiny eyes, stupendous trunks and teeny tails, lumpy skulls and lumbering feet. Then there is their bland color, somewhat the same as accountant’s grey flannel suits. Let’s face it: elephants just aren’t all that sexy. Everyone likes to pretend they aren’t even there, especially at cocktail parties.

When it comes to governments spending and waste, there are no bigger elephants in the room than the accounting and contract management systems. In B.C.'s case, they could even be mistaken for dinosaurs due to their old age. Even though our elephants have the power to move billions of taxpayer dollars around under the direction of civil service mahouts, nobody wants to talk about them. This is a huge oversight because our misshapen accounting and faltering contract management systems actually facilitate most of our government’s waste.

How exactly does this work? Let’s start with our accounting systems. Currently, B.C. runs a cash-based rather than activity-based system; money comes in and money goes out and the surplus (deficit) is duly recorded. Members of the house from time to time may joust over the number that comes out at the end, like so much elephant dung, but nobody really understands how well the digestive system actually works. This is because it all happens inside the system where all the inputs are mixed together, keeping the beast alive without much thought to health. No correlation between tax sources and spending programs is observed, measured or reported. Some programs draw down far more scarce tax dollars than are collected for the purpose. Meanwhile, other very critical programs get only a fraction of the funding one would expect for the taxes collected, despite their essential nature. In other words, some unproductive programs end up hugely subsidized while others are starved, simply because nobody – not even those inside government – have the ability to match taxes and fees with services and programs. This is as the mahouts like it.

The other unsexy beast digesting our tax dollars is actually magical: it barely exists, yet it’s effects are enormous. This would be the decrepit contract management systems used to administer taxpayer and user-funded programs. With hundreds of thousands of contracts, administered by tens of thousands of bureaucrats, and very few controls, the government’s ability to detect waste and fraud is virtually non-existent.

Whenever the proverbial dung hits the fan in a very public way, whether it’s major fraud or massive waste, the blame usually falls on a handful of handlers. However, had proper programs been in place to properly match revenues to programs and spending to services, wasteful subsidies and cancerous fraud would have little chance to occur in the first place. Unfortunately, this means media wouldn’t have as many big financial misdeeds to report and lobby groups would lose issues to fight on behalf of donors. No wonder nobody wants to talk about the elephants in the room. We all seem to have our wagons hitched up and dragging us along with them.