Foxes in the Hen-House
Professional services firm Ernst and Young (EY) has been hired to support the transition to the new Emergency Health Services Corporation that EMS will operate under come September 1st. This amounts to EY being paid millions of taxpayer dollars to do a job that our management should be capable of doing. If our EMS management cannot be trusted to oversee our own transition, then why should paramedics trust them with anything else?
As a reminder, EY has a history of suggesting privatization and cuts to public services as a justification for "finding efficiencies". They most recently did this in their 2019 review of AHS that cost Albertan taxpayers 2 million dollars. However, their abysmal track record shows a more thorough documented history of incompetence, questionable ethics and unprofessional behaviour. Here are a few of the most recent highlights of the work EY has done:
EY was fined 100 million dollars by the Security and Exchange Commission after several of their audit professionals were found to be cheating on chartered professional accountant exams and continuing education professional courses between 2017 and 2021. EY was also found to have interfered with the investigation that uncovered the cheating.
EY is currently being sued for 2.7 billion dollars by private hospital operator NMC Health after years of negligent EY audits failed to uncover billions in undisclosed debts and led to the collapse of NMC Health. A lawyer for NMC Health stated in a UK court that EY's audits were "among the most fundamentally flawed examples of big firm auditing".
In 2023, EY was banned for 2 years from auditing companies of public interest in Germany after failing as the auditor for Wirecard before their collapse in 2019
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in the United States found flaws in 46% of the 54 EY audits that they examined in 2022, resulting in $3Mil ethics fine.
EY was fined a combined 9.3 million pounds along with PricewaterhouseCoopers for auditing failures that allowed the now collapsed London Capital and Finance to lose 237 millions pounds of investor money in 2019
A British court ruled that EY had to pay a settlement to a former employee who was a whistle blower that was fired after exposing EY's efforts to cover up money laundering for private company Kaloti
EY should not be allowed anywhere near our healthcare system and paramedics don't want them involved in our transition or the EMS system. Most recently, EY has hosted an information session on work that they are doing to modernize EMS dispatch. First of all, this is a task that even the most average of EMS management groups should be capable of. Second, the suggestions from EY so far have been the exact same suggestions that paramedics have been making for years. Ideas like getting rid of pre alerts, creating a robust secondary triage system and reducing lights and sirens responses have been repeatedly brought up by frontline paramedics to all levels of management. Now EY is being paid millions of dollars to come up with these same suggestions, which frankly are low hanging fruit. Frontline paramedics still have not been consulted on our ideas to improve EMS and now we have to deal with the multi million dollar middleman EY, who we do not trust to listen to us. To be blunt, the task of ignoring frontline paramedics is now being outsourced to 3rd party consulting companies with multi million dollar contracts.
The restructuring of Alberta healthcare has never been about improving patient care. It has always been about creating chaos and opportunities to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of private companies and well connected individuals. More CEOs, more middle managers, more consultants and more contractors. The money being spent on restructuring and paying EY could have been spent on adding more ambulances to the road, building more hospitals and improving working conditions to retain and recruit healthcare workers. Instead, our patients continue to suffer because they can't access the care that they need and we continue to get crushed by an unsustainable workload. We still have not heard any reasonable explanations of how the healthcare restructuring will actually improve either of these issues.
