Charles Brown, who serves as the Auditor General for the City of Hamilton, recently released his 2025 Fraud and Waste Annual Report.
The report says that since the city implemented its Fraud and Waste Hotline in July 2019, the cumulative total of actual and potential losses investigated is over $3.7 million, with only 14.6 per cent of that amount ($548,979) recovered.
Over the course of a year (from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025), the Auditor General reportedly received 148 reports of suspected fraud and government waste – the second highest volume ever.
A total of 49 per cent of reports came from self-identified city employees, while the remaining 51 per cent came from the public.
The substantiation rate of complaints received was 32 per cent.
The Auditor General says that his office confirmed $124,796 in loss or waste since the last annual report was issued.
That number marks a significant improvement over the 2024 report, which determined that the municipality suffered $2.35 million in losses due to waste and mismanagement between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024.
The City of Hamilton recovered $502,000 since the last annual report, meaning that there were more recoveries than losses for the first time since the launch of the Fraud and Waste Hotline.
The Auditor General also noted, for the fifth year in a row, “the apparent difficulty that management experiences in properly dealing with conflict of interest situations that arise with employees of the city.”
Brown writes that his office has investigated more than 29 instances “where either the disclosure process or the related mitigation and monitoring of the conflict of interest has been an issue.”
He adds that conflicts of interest are one of the “most persistent, serious, and time-consuming” types of complaints received by the Auditor General and that even though the employee Code of Conduct was revamped, issues persist.
Brown states, “Proactively disclosing matters is not currently embedded in the city’s culture.”
“In addition to the recurring theme of conflict of interest policies and processes, we again cite recurring issues with the veracity of the city’s contract management processes,” Brown continued.
He says that issues with the city’s contract management will become even more “apparent” in his upcoming audit report of the Barton-Tiffany Temporary Shelters Project.
Examples of fraud and waste in the 2025 report include a contracted waste collection employee accepting bribes from residents to remove extra trash bags and using the truck to go off the regular route to collect waste from their personal residence, $6,500 in missing cash payments at one municipal program location, and an employee taking home equipment for use in their own business.
Luckily, the instances of fraud and waste were not as bad as the report from 2024.
The 2024 report detailed that the city was scammed out of over $800,000 after staff were tricked twice by an “imposter vendor,” that there was $1.2 million in rental revenues owed to the city that were “unlikely to be fully collected,” and that there were false benefit claims by three employees totalling almost $22,000.
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.
