I do agree that the application was developed and launched very quickly. Much of what the public service was doing at that time during the pandemic was being fast and effective to help support Canadians.
What we were looking at here was whether or not the government had achieved the best value for money and whether they could justify some of the decisions that had been made. What we saw is that there was very little justification for repeatedly asking for IT experience of 10 years or more, which is the highest level that is typically contracted out in the government. At the beginning, that might have made sense, but we would have expected that as time progressed, that reliance on external resources was likely not needed throughout the whole time.
It's an assessment that normally you would see at the outset. Figuring out if you had good project management practices in place, you would do an assessment of the needs, the resources and the skills that you need. Those were some of the things that were missing here with some of those fundamental project management processes. Both of those contributed to the fact that we likely paid too much for the app, because of that heavy, long-term reliance on external resources, often at the highest level.
The last thing I would add about that is that we saw instances in which individuals who were charged on invoices did not have 10 years of experience or more, yet the government paid the rate for 10 years of experience. Again, that contributed to our not getting good value for money.