Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, Carl Roe, suggested to the Game Commissioners that they fund and sponsor a deer audit to be done by the Wildlife Management Institute in order to put the issue to rest about the number of deer in the state and to legitimize the deer management plan that is in place by the PGC. It became clear right away that this was not going to happen.

Commissioner Tom Boop, chairman of the board’s executive committee, said all four members on that panel were “opposed to the hiring, at Pennsylvania Game Commission expense,” of the Institute, for various reasons.

One of the committee members, commissioner Greg Isabella of Philadelphia, said that the commission is already operating on a “bare bones” level because it hasn’t had a license fee increase in nearly a decade.

There’s no sense spending money that’s needed elsewhere to have an audit done, Isabella said, especially since any review — were it to validate the commission’s deer program — would be dismissed by the agency’s critics anyway.

“They’ll never believe us, for whatever reason. They’ll just use it for whatever purpose they have,” Isabella said.

Commissioner Dan Hill of Erie County is not a member of the board’s executive committee, but said he would have voted against paying for an audit, too. For an audit to be perceived as being “independent of bias,” it must be defined, managed, paid for and announced by someone outside the agency itself.

An audit of the commission paid for by the commission using an auditor of the commission’s choosing doesn’t fit that bill, he said.

“You don’t solve anything with an audit under those circumstances. You never end the debate,” Hill said.

“If an audit is going to be done, it needs to be independent, or else why do it?”

Tom Remington

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