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Mint changes its gold count
Gloria Galloway
The Royal Canadian Mint is changing the way it keeps track of its gold after losing some $15-million worth of the precious metal earlier this year - only to find out it was never really lost at all.
The Mint released the results of third-party reviews on Monday that its officials say fully account for the discrepancy of 17,500 ounces between the amount of gold in its records and the amount it had on hand.
They said in a statement on Monday the Crown Corporation has learned “some valuable lessons” from the ordeal.
In the future, they said, the count of the stock of precious metal would be conducted quarterly instead of twice a year, the refining of all slag by-products will be done internally, a new metal comptroller and additional material management staff have been hired, more “robust accounting measures have been implemented, estimates of processing losses have been revised, and the staff will be better prepared for the quarterly count.
When the discrepancy was first discovered, the mystery of the missing gold sparked an outcry from opposition members in the House of Commons and a full-scale investigation by the RCMP.
In the end, the “loss” was attributed to accounting errors and an underestimate of the amount of metal that is lost during processing.
Deloitte and Touche recommended in June, after the discrepancy was discovered, that the Mint retain third parties to review its security and computer systems, its technical operations, and its accounting from earlier periods.
The security review found that "there is no evidence of unauthorized removal of precious metals from the Mint,” a finding that was supported by the RCMP.
The Mint refines more than five million troy ounces of gold a year, brought in as raw metal or scrap jewellery to be turned into 400-ounce gold bars.
Because of the complexities of refining operations, the physical count of gold is rarely exactly what the paper records indicate, but the discrepancies are usually much smaller than the ones announced by the Mint this year.
Something stinks here. Their telling us that there was no theft and it was just one big accounting error yet their also taking control over the refining process.
The refinement process was the one way that the gold could have been stolen so their taking control over it makes me suspicious. It sounds to me that someone did steal gold through the refinement slag but since they don't have enough proof for a case, their hiding it under an accounting error.
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