A Senator from southern Manitoba has repaid about $3,000.00 in expenses that the Auditor General found to be inappropriate. Don Plett says he reported the errors to the Auditor General and immediately made amends.

"I'm very saddened by the fact that I'm caught up in this. There were clearly two administrative errors here in my office that, ironically, we found for the auditor, the auditor didn't find, we found the two claims where we had clearly messed up here in our office. I flagged that for the auditor and immediately offered to pay that back."

But Plett disputes two other expense claims the Auditor General wants him to repay. For example, he says one of them involves a time when he was on vacation in Calgary. Then Public Safety Minister Vic Toews summoned him to a meeting in Ottawa for a meeting with Corrections Canada regarding a file they were working on. The auditor says Plett should have flown on his own dime to Winnipeg and then expensed the flight from there to Ottawa. He disagrees saying the rules stipulate, when a minister of the crown asks you to fly somewhere, it's considered official business. But Plett reiterates that he is upset that mistakes were made in his office on some other claims.

"I'm sad, I'm embarrassed that there would be something there that I have made a mistake on. I assured people two years ago, when this started, that there would be nothing there where I had wilfully defrauded or wilfully taken money that wasn't mine and I can still stand on that, that I haven't done that. And I'm sure many of my colleagues have exactly the same issues. And so I think the ones that did make honest mistakes, if you will, will be the ones that will be pushing the hardest now to make sure that some of these things are corrected."

Plett says he and a number of other Senators are working hard to improve Senate transparency and he is confident the Senate will be able to rebuild its credibility. He notes, every nickel of taxpayers' dollars that he spends is now accounted for on his website in a quarterly report.

Plett says, despite all of the grief in the Senate in the past two years, he is still enjoying the work.

"I'm still enjoying coming to work every day. I think we do great work, especially at our committees. I'm on the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, dealing with all of our Government's crime legislation and it's an honour, still, for me to be here and work on behalf of Canadians every day in moving our crime legislation forward. That is what I signed up for and that is what I'm still doing and enjoying every day of it "