Angry in the Great White North

At eHealth, the scandal has claimed another victim:

An eHealth Ontario consultant who was paid $2,700 a day - and still charged taxpayers $1.65 for Tim Hortons tea and $3.99 for Choco Bites - left the troubled agency yesterday, justifying her expenses and licking her wounds over the spending scandal.

"I billed what the policy told me I could do," Donna Strating told the Star, noting she often worked from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m.

"I didn't expense, you know, thousands of lavish meals and I, unfortunately, happen to like muffins and chocolate chip cookies. And so I bought those ... instead of sitting down at a full-course meal and dining."

Now recently I defended the notion of a $2,700 per day fee:

It's very reasonable.  Here's why.

At a lot of consultancy firms, there is a large staff.  Office staff, researchers, managers, interns, and so on.  Only a small number of staff are actual on-site consultants.

This small group is collectively labelled billable.  On the books, the customer is paying this this person to do the work.  But it's not just this person.  He doesn't get $2,750 a day.  The $2,750 a day goes to the company.  That money then gets redistributed to pay bills and salaries.

Including the salary of the consultant, by the way.  He never sees $2,750 a day, or anything remotely close to it.  He sees a far more reasonable amount, as do all the unbillable people back at the office.  So when he sees his weekly paycheque consistent with someone who makes, say, $80,000 a year, then charging for food (as long as it is under the per diem guidelines) is perfectly appropriate.

As I pointed out, the billable employee (the consultant) is really charging an aggregate fee meant to pay for all the unbillable people back at the consultant's office.

But what if there is no office and no staff?

She's retiring to raise horses at her country property outside Edmonton, where she previously worked for the Capital Health agency.

"I needed to consider that, regardless of what they proposed to me, could I rebuild or feel that the credibility existed, quite honestly. Or would the press take one more stab at it and try and discredit any decision I made except, quite honestly, working for free," Strating said in a wide-ranging interview before repairing to her Summerhill apartment to pack for a flight home last night.

"And so my decision was I have a personal life and a husband and a future and I guess I'll go back to that if it's not respected what I did here," added the mother of two children in college.

A well-placed provincial source said it would have been difficult for eHealth to bring Strating on board full-time after the political firestorm created by the eHealth spending scandal without prompting more questions about financial management at the agency.

There is no mention of a consultancy firm, like Warren Kinsella's Daisy Group.  Warren Kinsella can charge fees like that (I'm not saying he does, but he could) because those fees help pay the salaries of four or five other people (or more) who help behind the scenes.

There doesn't appear to be anyone behind the scenes in the case of Donna Strating.

So I have to join in with everyone else and wonder just who thought this level of compensation represented value for money?