The CEO of Atira Women’s Resource Society has resigned from her post one week after her organization’s financial practices, and her marriage, were thrust into the spotlight by a damning audit.
Janice Abbott announced Monday she is stepping down from the top job at Atira, a non-profit she has led since 1992. Abbott has not granted a media interview since the forensic audit of BC Housing was published on May 8.
“The Board thanks Janice for helping thousands of women and children over her 31 years of leadership at Atira,” said Atira board chair Elva Kim in a news release.
“The focus for the Board now is working collaboratively with the B.C. government and BC Housing, and restoring the public’s confidence in Atira’s integrity, vision, mission, purpose and values.”
Global News has reached out to Atira multiple times for comment on all matters related to the audit, its operations, and efforts to resolve ongoing oversight challenges.
Last week, a long-awaited financial audit of BC Housing revealed serious mismanagement and conflict of interest issues between the Crown Corporation and Atira, its largest housing provider.
Abbott is married to former BC Housing CEO, Shane Ramsay. Both held those jobs at the same time.
While no individual materially benefitted from that relationship, the Ernst and Young report found that while Ramsay was CEO, Atira was awarded contracts without a competitive process, received a substantial increase in funding, and got at least $3 million in COVID-19 funds without appropriate internal BC Housing approval.
Atira also took actions contrary to its operation agreements, the audit found, including using $2 million in restricted, repayable funds to help fund a property purchase. The provider bypassed BC Housing’s standard approval channels and approached senior members of the Crown corporation directly for funding and other requests multiple times, it added.
Ramsay, meanwhile, modified meeting minutes to alter concerns raised about an Atira property purchase, and regularly deleted text messages despite habitually conducting BC Housing business through texts, the Ernst and Young report stated.
“It was not just the bad behavior of a few, but actually the failure of oversight and the culture of secrecy and silence that enabled that,” Carol Liao, an associate law professor at the University of British Columbia told Global News last week.
“The urgency and the breadth of the housing crisis in B.C. — to me, it can really open up opportunities for exploitation and corporate misconduct, and the importance of Atira’s mandate and the vulnerability of its demographic that it serves, to me adds a heightened responsibility for them to act ethically.”
Since the audit came to light, the B.C. government has restricted new funding to Atira and suspended all its operating agreements until a new audit of the housing provider is complete. All of Atira’s buildings are also undergoing physical inspection.
Last Friday, Atira confirmed it has returned $1.9 million to the province and created a task force that will oversee a third-party review of its policies and practices, including a deep dive into how the organization makes decisions on real estate and deals with potential conflicts of interest.
While work is underway to appoint the independent review team, the task force itself has already come under fire for being comprised of Atira’s board chair and chairs of the society’s finance and governance committees.
“While having a third party conduct the review is obviously necessary for these circumstances, the trick is that those that are commissioning the review can dictate its scope,” Liao said.
At an unrelated press conference on Monday, B.C. Premier David Eby said he was “more hopeful” than ever that the province, BC Housing and Atira would be able to get back on track.
“I understand from the housing minister that Atira has reached out to government … that they will ensure their books are open for our third-party audit, that they will be co-operating and supporting all of the operational reviews that are required to ensure they are meeting expectations, that we can follow every public dollar,” he said, after learning of Abbott’s resignation.
“I want to thank them for that commitment. That is the path towards restoring trust and ensuring we can move forward.”
Ramsay has not walked away from last week’s forensic audit unscathed either.
In an emailed statement last week, Nch’kay Development confirmed Ramsay was no longer serving as its executive vice president. Nch’kay Development is the development arm of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw, or Squamish Nation in English.
Ramsay resigned as the CEO of BC Housing last fall, stating: “I no longer have confidence I can solve the complex problems facing us at BC Housing.”
His retirement came after multiple serious assaults on people in downtown Vancouver, and after being “swarmed by opponents and threatened with physical violence” after a meeting.
Last week’s forensic audit found BC Housing had poor record-keeping and delayed financial reviews of Atira. Overall, the Crown corporation’s management and oversight practices created “significant risks” for public funds, it said.
It’s the second time Ernst and Young has investigated BC Housing at the request of the provincial government. Last spring, it made 44 recommendations for improving operations, concluding that BC Housing’s organizational structure had resulted in siloed service delivery, its systems were not meeting the needs of “functional areas,” and with 80 to 85 per cent of its services delivered through non-profit providers, its manual oversight process was limited.
Half of BC Housing’s board was fired after that review, which also found roles and responsibilities within the organization were unclear, project administration processes were largely undocumented, and no formalized data governance was in place.
A few months after the May 2022 review, a leaked report outlined extensive mismanagement within Atira.
The document from BDO Canada LLP claimed Atira’s board made decisions based on “incorrect, incomplete or misleading information,” applied “inconsistent accounting practices across the portfolio,” and operated on “assumptions that BC Housing will cover any overages” to its budget. BC Housing and Atira initiated the financial review and it was sent to the non-profit organization on Nov. 7, 2018.In its Monday news release, Atira’s board said the organization will be led in the interim by its executive directors of operations, human resources and finance — Sarah Louie, Niki Antonopoulou, and Ashley Kim, respectively.
The housing provider has agreed to have a B.C. government representative appointed to its board as an observer, it added, and it is reiterating its “commitment to open, transparent and proactive communication” with the province and BC Housing.
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