This is just weird. Not only can the Canadian government not account for more than 15 million dollars worth of gold bars that were supposed to be sitting in their version of Fort Knox but after weeks of investigation they still aren’t sure if they were robbed. At least that’s what they’re claiming:

OTTAWA — The distinct possibility that precious metals may have been stolen from the Royal Canadian Mint is “inexcusable,” the federal minister responsible for the Crown corporation said Monday.

The findings of a long-awaited external audit, released earlier in the day, concluded that $15.3 million in missing gold is not the result of accounting or bookkeeping errors, raising even more questions about the whereabouts of the metals from what has been touted as one of the most secure facilities in Canada.

“The mint’s still unexplained loss of precious metals is inexcusable,” Transport Minister John Baird and Minister of State for Transport Rob Merrifield, whose department is responsible for the mint, said in a joint release. “The mint will be held accountable.”

The Royal Canadian Mint says the precious metals seem to have vanished from its inventory in the 2008 fiscal year, according to the third-party review conducted by Deloitte & Touche LLP.

External auditors have been working since early March to determine whether theft or an accounting error is behind an “unreconciled difference” between the mint’s 2008 financial records and its physical stockpile of gold and other precious metals at its downtown Ottawa headquarters.

The report released Monday concluded that “the unaccounted-for difference in gold does not appear to relate to an accounting error in the reconciliation process, an accounting error in the physical stock count schedules, or an accounting error in the record-keeping of transactions during the year.”

It is not clear at this stage whether any gold is physically missing from the inventory, the corporation said in a release. “All possible explanations for the inventory difference need to be investigated.”

The Mint is claiming that the missing amount is a small portion of their total “stock” but the Mint’s total stock, as I understand it, includes non-gold precious metals (some of which are also missing!) and gold certificates. That means that A) the missing stock should have been noticed rather quickly and B) this loss may not be so nominal if it turns out Canada has more precious metal commodity contracts than gold on hand.

Either way this is a heist of historic proportions, even if it turns out not to have been a heist in the traditional sense. Countries, like investors, have been buying up gold to weather the recession and like many investors countries have been accepting paper in lieu of physical gold. Of course there is much more paper representing gold out there than actual gold (which is why there’s a market for your crap necklaces – they need those scraps to honor their commitments) so a big chunk of a country’s gold horde that’s gone missing may not be easily replaced even if Canada had the cash to do so.

h/t Survivalblog