Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government will table legislation to overhaul Tarion Warranty Corporation in the wake of an auditor’s report that found developers were being favoured at the expense of new homeowners.

A value-for-money audit, conducted by the province’s auditor general in October, found that consumers were being underserved by the very corporation that was tasked to help homebuyers settle disputes with builders.

“What is often a person’s biggest single purchase in their life was sometimes turned into a frustrating and unnecessarily costly experience,” Ontario’s Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk said in her report.

Tarion is a private not-for-profit corporation that was set up in the late 70’s to license residential developers and ensure that they honour their warranties on new homes and condominiums.

While Tarion doesn’t offer warranties itself, it was designed to help new homebuyers settle warranty disputes with builders.

However, the auditor found Tarion often turned down a purchaser’s plea for help because the request was made outside of a narrow 30-day window, and that Tarion’s rules left homeowners waiting up to 18 months for a defect to be fixed.

The report also found senior executives were receiving bonuses based on “how well they kept a led on payouts to new homebuyers.”

Barbara Captijn, who founded the advocacy group Consumers’ Reform Tarion after a bad experience with a new home, says the corporation often protects “shoddy builders” from consumers looking to fix their homes.

“We’re not talking about paint smudges on mirrors. We’re taking about serious construction defects – mold, crack foundations, leaking roofs leaking basements and serious HVAC deficiencies where children are sleeping with mittens and caps on to try to keep warm in the dead of winter,” Captjin said.

“We as consumers have been silenced and muzzled and threatened by Tarion itself, by various builders.”

While Tarion says it “accepts” and is working to implement the auditor general’s recommendations, Ontario NDP Leader Horwath is calling on the government to take further action.

The party will introduce a private members bill aimed at creating a new crown agency tasked with overseeing a “multi-provider warranty system” and is asking Ford to remove Tarion’s CEO and board and appoint an administration to oversee the organization.

“No one at Queen’s Park should be comfortable with allowing this rigged system to go on,” Horwath said.

The government said in a statement Wednesday that the auditor and NDP have “rightfully pointed out” that governance and board compensation issues at Tarion have been the “root cause of much of the hardship that new home buyers in the province have faced.”

A spokesperson for Consumer Services Minister Lisa Thompson says new legislation will be brought forward “in the coming weeks.”