Don’t know if you have worked in the government, but I have, and this doesn’t surprise me in the least.

Nor should it surprise anyone who has reviewed budgets in the past.

Treasury Board allocates funds at the beginning of each fiscal year.  It is the Department’s responsibility to spend and track them.  If the budget isn’t at 0 by March 31, funds lapse.

The glacial pace of the bureaucracy, coupled with asinine regulations regarding procurement, means it is all too easy to let earmarked funds go unspent.  Worse yet, senior executive bonuses are partly tied to expenditure.  So the months of January and February are often a riot of procurement, sometimes for goods that are of no real use except to make the budget numbers look better.

It isn’t really a bad thing (funds lapsing), since it’s not like tax dollars disappear.  But the funding and bonus  models along with accrual based accounting and arcane procurement make for waste and inefficiency that could easily be avoided.