It started last March, when someone told the auditor general's office a story.
It's not uncommon for that watchdog to get lurid tales of corruption and wrongdoing straight off the street. Not all of them check out.
The auditor general forwarded the allegations about improprieties at the pharmaceutical-services division to the health ministry, on a "for your information" basis.
And after five months of internal probing, it turns out that whoever told this story seems to have all the facts nailed down. Even before a full report is completed, four health ministry officials have been fired and three more are suspended without pay.
An important research program has been suspended, $4 million worth of contracts cancelled and the RCMP has been asked to investigate. All of this has developed with only the haziest public explanation of what is going on.
It has to do with contracting and research-grant practices between ministry employees and researchers at the University of B.C. and the University of Victoria. The investigation has produced evidence of potential conflicts of interest and inappropriate contract management and data access with external drug researchers.
The suggestions are that contracts were being awarded by officials to people close to them and that data is being used by researchers who haven't obtained the right permissions to use the information.
It's a startling story for a number of reasons. The ministry has any number of rules, regulations and procedures that are explicitly aimed at prohibiting exactly what's described from happening.
The ministry has published conflict-of-interest guidelines that apply to a senior group involved in the drug benefit review process.
Presumably, similar standards apply to everyone involved in that work. They aim for the "highest ethical standards" and maintenance of the integrity of the reviews.
Transparency and disclosure are considered essential. Conflicts of interest are to be identified and resolved, states the policy.
The same stringent policies to do with proper handling of scientific data have been in place for years. And there's a whole field of regulations to do with processing of information in general.
But a significant share of the people in the office where all the rules are most pertinent seem to have completely ignored them.
It's particularly striking because the ministry went through a protracted corruption scandal several years ago over a senior official's cosy dealings with a contractor.
Officials rushed through a whole series of reforms after that dismaying series of revelations. They thought they had cleaned up their act. So there's more consternation and dismay than usual to find that the drugresearch process seems to have escaped the crackdown.
The auditor general passed the allegations to the ministry on March 28. Within weeks, the ministry determined there was enough validity to the claims that a formal in-depth investigation was warranted.
That started in May, and by June they had enough to start coming down on a number of employees. Suspensions without pay - an unusual move in the public service - were imposed over the summer and four people were fired this week.
After Margaret MacDiarmid was sworn in as health minister, replacing Mike de Jong, the scandalous story was the first item in her briefing binder. She reacted with incredulous disbelief.
The new minister hit all the right notes this week in expressing how profoundly disappointing the case is.
But the ministry's response to date has been to rejig the regulations and pile some more regulations into the manual.
That's not going to cut it. MacDiarmid said: "There's clear legislation and policy in this area, the way that data research is to be done, the way that contracts are to be managed, and we believe that those rules, regulations and legislation have not been followed."
She said so far it's a case of people finding a way to circumvent good rules and policies.
The ministry doesn't need any more rules. It needs a lot more hard looks at whether existing policies are being followed, in the form of random independent audits.
The RCMP are just receiving information at this point on the scope of the scandal. When the motivation for all the improprieties is determined, that will set the course.
If people were breaking rules to get a job done the quick and easy way, it's unlikely to attract their interest.
But if there are personal benefits being handed out by people in positions of trust, this story will get even nastier than it already is.
