Another former Niagara Region senior bureaucrat, hired by former chief administrative officer Carmen D'Angelo and later fired by the municipality, has joined the management team at the City of Brampton.

Maciej Jurczyk, the director of an internal auditing team at the Region, is now working for Brampton in a similar role, The Standard has learned.

Jurczyk, who lost his regional post in January when his department was shut down, is the latest former Niagara government manager to be hired by the administration of Mayor Patrick Brown.

In the spring, the city hired Jason Tamming as its director of communications. Tamming was formerly the communications chief of ex-regional chair Alan Caslin, and was a key player in the 2016 CAO hiring scandal that saw D'Angelo get the lucrative job.

Reporting by The Standard and an investigation by the Ontario Ombudsman show that Tamming was part of a scheme to manipulate the hiring process to ensure D'Angelo got the job.

In Brampton, Tamming works with city CAO David Barrick, the former regional councillor for Port Colborne and former senior manager at the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority. Barrick served on the NPCA board of directors with D'Angelo until 2013 when a management post was created for him. D'Angelo was hired as NPCA CAO in 2014, a post he held until he got his regional job in 2016. In 2018, Ontario's Auditor General flagged the hiring of Barrick and D'Angelo at the NPCA as examples of poor hiring practices at the agency.

Barrick, who served briefly as NPCA CAO before leaving the agency and taking his post in Brampton, was also a player in the D'Angelo affair. Months before the Niagara CAO hiring process started, Barrick attempted to recruit another senior manager to start promoting D'Angelo as the new CAO among regional staff to make the transition easier when he was eventually hired.

Brampton city councillors have said they were not informed of Barrick's and Tamming's political pasts, and Brown has hailed the pair as among the best municipal leaders in Canada.

Jurczyk, who previously worked for the City of Brampton, has not been implicated in the CAO hiring scandal. He was hired by D'Angelo in June 2017 to lead a newly created department called ICOPS or the Internal Controls and Organizational Performance department. D'Angelo created the unit to be an internal auditing office.

However, a year-long review of regional operations by the auditing firm KPMG questioned the overall effectiveness and "value for money" of the internal auditing division, and said the Region could save nearly $1 million annually by disbanding the unit and relying instead on external auditors.

Some regional councillors and senior staff also questioned Jurczyk's department. In particular, they were critical of an audit of smaller regional procurements. The audit's conclusions were based on only 52 of more than 17,500 transactions.

In January, Jurczyk and 10 members of the 18-person department were fired. The remaining employees were reassigned to other regional departments.

KPMG has been hired to do a comprehensive audit of regional departments and policies, including procurement.

Jurczyk did not respond to an interview request from The Standard for this story.

NOTE TO READERS: This story has been updated from a previous version to correctly identify when David Barrick and Carmen D'Angelo worked at the NPCA.

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