A new report from the City of Hamilton’s Auditor General Charles Brown found “widespread procedural fairness concerns” with the City of Hamilton’s human resources investigation framework and overall processes.
Brown called the audit findings “serious and significant.”
“It is critical that the city modernize its HR investigations process to ensure it conforms with accepted standards for workplace investigations in Ontario,” he added.
The audit was launched after an employee of the city who was the respondent in a Human Resources investigation made a complaint to the Office of the Auditor General in mid-2024 about the investigation process.
The Auditor General decided to conduct an audit, which included examination of a randomly selected sample of 14 completed investigation files.
The report says that the purpose of the audit “was to assess the extent to which the City of Hamilton’s HR investigations process reflects accepted standards for neutrality, procedural fairness, thoroughness, timeliness, consistency, and legal defensibility, and to identify whether observed issues are systemic.”
The Auditor General engaged a third-party expert with a legal background in the field of HR investigations.
The audit identified eight major issues in relation to notice and particulars, investigation planning, evidence collection and preservation, opportunity to respond, evidence evaluation and reasoning, reporting and communications, quality assurance, and timeliness.
Overall, a summary of the audit says that the identified indicators suggest a “lack of neutrality in a number of investigations.”
Brown writes that the substantiation rate of 76 per cent in the sample 14 cases was “unusually high” and paired with the other issues “raises concerns that complainant evidence may in some cases have been accepted with insufficient scrutiny and/or that respondent evidence was not assessed with comparable rigour.”
“Furthermore, the audit found procedural fairness concerns to be widespread across the sample, with material deficiencies in 13 of the 14 investigations,” continued Brown.
Examples of issues include that “responding parties generally did not receive the Summary of Allegations (SOA) in advance of interviews,” “in many files relevant witnesses were not interviewed and/or were not asked about issues on which they were expected to have relevant evidence,” “evidence preservation and file organization were inconsistent,” and “parties were often not given a meaningful opportunity to respond to contradictory evidence or inconsistencies.”
Brown also wrote, “Reports frequently lacked complete, balanced evidence summaries, credibility analysis was absent or insufficient, material inconsistencies were not addressed, and findings of fact and policy conclusions were unclear and/or inadequately supported.”
Brown identified that the primary root causes and factors contributing to the deficiencies “as a lack of neutrality safeguards to mitigate against confirmation bias, analysis gaps, weak or non-existent standard operating procedures that would ensure consistency and adherence to practice requirements and standards, inadequate oversight and quality assurance, expectations for brevity in report writing that led or contributed to insufficient documentation of how findings are reached, time and resource constraints, and gaps with respect to the implementation of skills and knowledge.”
He made six detailed recommendations for improvement in the audit: targeted training and continuing professional development, strengthening of processes, more rigorous oversight and quality assurance, an update and redesign of investigative templates, improvements to key areas such as file organization, and revisions to policy and procedures.
It should be noted that two senior City of Hamilton human resources staffers left their jobs back in June.
The city simply announced at the time that Executive Director Lora Fontana and Director Jodi Koch were “no longer employed.”
The city has refused to comment further.
The Auditor General’s report follows other scathing reports in recent years identifying issues with city staff and city procedures, including an audit of the problematic Barton-Tiffany tiny shelter project and how the city was left vulnerable to the 2024 cyberattack.
The Hamilton Independent’s coverage of the Barton-Tiffany audit can be read here, while the cyberattack audit can be read here.
Based in Hamilton, he reaches hundreds of thousands of people monthly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. He has been published in The Hamilton Spectator, Stoney Creek News, and Bay Observer. He has also been a segment host with Cable 14 Hamilton. In 2017, he received the Chancellor Full Tuition Scholarship from the University of Ottawa (BA, 2022). He has also received the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He formerly worked in a non-partisan role on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
