Your Tax Dollars At Play

Go out for a night on the town with the boys. Take in the game, have a few beer, order the buffalo wings.

Bitch about work for a few minutes. Go to work tomorrow and ask A/P to expense it back.

Result: A/P laughs it off, at best. You clean out your desk, at worst.

If you run a PR firm working on the sponsorship file, the above rules don't apply. Boy, don't they apply.

See today's Globe and Mail for details:

The federal government paid the head of an ad agency and his employees to attend hockey games, concerts and even an evening of professional wrestling at a corporate box in Ottawa's Corel Centre as part of the sponsorship program, the Gomery inquiry heard yesterday.

....

Mr. Justice John Gomery, who heads the inquiry, was told that for the 1997-98 and 1998-99 seasons, the government paid at least $133,000 for the use of corporate boxes at the Corel Centre, plus $27,000 a year for catering.

The payments were part of a two-year, $600,000 sponsorship with the Ottawa Senators that ended up costing taxpayers more than $1-million once all additional expenses were included.

The sponsorship was handled by the Ottawa PR firm of Gilles-André Gosselin, whose employees and relatives charged the government for 3,414 hours of work, mostly to attend events at the Corel Centre.

These included Ottawa Senators hockey games; concerts by country singer Alan Jackson, the Backstreet Boys, Shania Twain and crooner Neil Diamond; a Lord of the Dance show and a World Wrestling Federation event.

A Backstreet Boys concert? How many 14-year old girls were working the sponsorship file?