The province is on the hook for $304 million in cost overruns at the Pan Am Games, but top executives were still paid out millions in bonuses, according to auditor general Bonnie Lysyk.

In a report released Wednesday, Lysyk also stated that computer hard drives her investigators requested were not all handed over by the Games’ organizing committee, including that of the CEO (Saad Rafi). Of the 12 hard drives requested, TO2015 handed over only three to the auditors, she told reporters.

“Their practice was to upload information to the cloud. But can we be sure we have everything? No,” Lysyk said in an interview.

The report found 53 senior staff were paid $5.3 million in bonuses at the end of Games for finishing out the entire length of their contracts and meeting budget targets. Those payments come in addition to annual performance bonuses of $10.5 million.

The auditor found the total cost of the Games, including the athletes’ village, was about $2.53 billion.

Transportation plans, additional security, Tim Hortons Field in Hamilton and the Goldring centre at the University of Toronto contributed to the cost overruns, along with costs for creating a provincial secretariat to oversee delivery, and promotional costs.

Some venues built for the Games could incur further costs, the report found.

New Democrat MPP Paul Miller (Hamilton East-Stoney Creek) called the bonuses disappointing.

“If I was doing the job and I performed that way I wouldn’t expect any bonus and I probably would end up in court and I probably could have been fired for that performance,” he told reporters, referring to the ongoing legal troubles at Tim Hortons Field in Hamilton. (The city is seeking $35 million in damages from Infrastructure Ontario, TO2015, and the contractor over claims of breach of contract. All parties are actively working toward settlement.)

The auditor also found that a change to the operating budget in 2014 would have pushed a portion of the bonuses out of reach as per the original terms of the deal.

“At the end of the day budget was increased, so you know, the rules were changed,” Lysyk told reporters.

Michael Coteau, minister of tourism, culture and sport responsible for the Games, said Wednesday that the Games had come in under budget according to the government’s calculations.

While the auditor broke the numbers into two piles — one for operating the Games, and one for building the athletes’ village — the government sees the budget as a whole, he said. Part of the discrepancy also comes from the auditor adjusting the bid budget to cut out more than $200 million spent on preparing the West Don Lands for development, reasoning it would have been spent regardless. Coteau added later in an interview that costs the auditor put on the province are on the books of other levels of government, and some are fixed costs from within the ministries.

The government’s forecast had the overall cost of the Games coming in at $2.38 billion, just under the bid budget of $2.4 billion.

Coteau also touted the event as the “most transparent Games ever.” But opposition members countered that claim, pointing to the auditor’s difficulties acquiring requested items.

In an interview, Lysyk said the probability that something was missed is low, but yet the absence of some information warranted mention. A consultants’ report outlining the logic behind paying out the performance bonuses was also unavailable, she said in an interview.

“Their view would be, the information is in the cloud. Our perspective would be, we would prefer to have had the hard drive,” she told the Star.

“Because there’s choices as to what you put in the cloud.”

Lysyk said information from the hard drives was sent to a cloud server at the discretion of individuals. When they finished with their contracts their leased hard drives were wiped and returned.

When the auditor’s investigation began in the fall, the team requested 12 hard drives of interest from current employees, including CEO Rafi. Only three of the drives were turned over.

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The fact that Rafi’s wasn’t made available was “disappointing” for the audit team, Lysyk said. “It was available when we asked for it, it just wasn’t available when we followed up.”

In an emailed statement, Rafi said TO2015 took record retention “very seriously” all relevant files were stored in the shared servers, along with emails. When asked in a follow-up email why his hard drive in particular wasn’t kept when the audit was announced, Rafi did not answer by press time.

“The government has had a history of hiding their records,” Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown told reporters outside the legislature. “It seems every month there’s a new chapter to the book on this government’s secrecy.”

Coteau told the Star all the information from the hard drives was put into the cloud according to the procedures laid out for the public service by Archives Ontario.

The Star reached out to Archives Ontario to ask about those procedures, including whether it was standard practice to allow individuals to decide what is uploaded to the cloud and if there are timelines for keeping records after a project. The questions were referred to Coteau’s ministry.

“TO2015 informed us that all record retention requirements as requested by Archives Ontario were followed,” read an emailed statement from the ministry.

“The auditor general’s staff was granted full access to the shared computer storage system. In addition they were given access to all hard copy files — over 300 boxes,” it said.

Coteau called the hard drives “an instrument” rather than the information.

“It’s not like the old days where you can say, hand over the hard drive, or even before that, hand over the documents. It’s just a different way to retain information,” he said.

Lysyk drew a line between general record-keeping procedures and those done while being audited.

“When an audit is underway there is an expectation that information be retained at the time the audit’s starting,” she said in an interview.

“It was still worth doing the audit. The report is, I believe, pretty thorough in presenting the information in a factual way. We’re just highlighting that that wasn’t available for us.”