MONTRÉAL, QC: The Canadian Taxpayers Federation echoed the calls from Montreal’s auditor general to renew the city’s budget-making tools.

“Excel shouldn’t be used to track spending on anything bigger than a bake sale, let alone the police service’s $655-million compensation budget,” said CTF Quebec Director Renaud Brossard. “Montreal needs the right tools to track the billions of dollars municipal taxpayers entrust it with.”

According to Auditor General Michèle Galipeau, preparing the city’s $6.17 billion budget “rests in large part on a multitude of Excel files and outdated applications that are no longer supported by the service providers.”

The city’s main budgeting tool, a software named Système budgétaire automatisé, was designed in 1993, before the amalgamations. As the software wasn’t built to communicate with Excel, data entry has to be done manually by city employees, which takes time and increases the risk of errors.

This has an impact in the city’s ability to track spending, as the auditor general notes, as there is no way to reconcile compensation between the city’s budget-planning software and its HR management software without “considerable effort.”

As early as 2009, a report produced for the city warned of the urgency to update the budget-making tools. The project was delayed twice. The city expects to start a project to change it in 2024.

“It’s high time for the city of Montreal to join the rest of us in the 21^st century,” said Brossard. “Taxpayers shouldn’t have to wait until 2024 for the city to give itself the right tools to manage their tax dollars efficiently.”