Human Resources Committee on June 6th, 2019

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Good morning, everyone.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motions adopted by the committee on Tuesday, May 28, 2019, the committee will now commence its study of report 1, “Call Centres”, of the 2019 spring reports of the Auditor General of Canada.

We are joined this morning by representatives from the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, including Sylvain Ricard, the Interim Auditor General of Canada, as well as two of his staff: Jean Goulet, Principal of Performance Audit, Audit Operations; and Joanna Murphy, Director of Performance Audit, Audit Operations.

Thank you all for joining us here today.

I will now welcome Mr. Ricard to make an opening statement of up to 10 minutes, after which we'll open up the floor for questions.

[Sylvain Ricard, Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General]

Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to present the results of our recent audit report on call centres. Joining me today are Jean Goulet and Joanna Murphy, who were responsible for the audit.

In this audit we looked at the call centres of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada; Veterans Affairs Canada; and Employment and Social Development Canada, including the employment insurance as well as the Canada pension plan and old age security call centres. We also looked at whether the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat included call centres within the Government of Canada's service strategy and whether Shared Services Canada provided support to modernize call centres.

This audit is important because call centres are a key source of government information. This is especially true for people who are visually impaired, have intellectual or physical disabilities, do not have a computer or Internet access or the skills to use these technologies, or who live in rural or remote regions and do not have high-speed Internet access or cannot easily get to a government office.

Canadians make millions of calls to the government every year to get the information they need to make time-sensitive, important decisions. For example, they may be calling to ensure that they receive benefits on time or to find out about the status of an application.

Overall, we found that getting through to government call centres took time and persistence. In fact, we found that half of the 16 million Canadians who tried to speak with an agent could not do so. Seven million callers were redirected to an automated system, were told to visit the website, or were disconnected. In addition, more than a million callers gave up waiting and hung up.

We also found that service decisions were not driven by callers' needs. For example, departments did not offer callers the option of staying on the line or of getting called back when an agent became available.

The way in which call centres set service standards was not relevant to Canadians, transparent or consistent. None of the call centres we audited had service standards on clients' likelihood of reaching an agent or on the accuracy of the answers they provide to callers.

Regarding Employment and Social Development Canada, we found that when the department reported on its service standard to answer 80% of calls within 10 minutes, it did not include calls during which the caller hung up after reaching the queue. The department also published call centre performance results that were based on unverified data. Without service standards, callers cannot know what level of service they can expect from call centres.

And the situation is unlikely to improve in the near future. The government's clients first service strategy does not include call centres, though more than 25% of Canadians use the telephone to connect with the government.

In addition, after five years of a call centre modernization project, Shared Services Canada has managed to upgrade only eight of 221 call centres, and it has no plan for the remaining 213. We made five recommendations, including two to Employment and Social Development Canada. All organizations have agreed with all of them and have shared their action plans with us.

Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you, sir.

First for questions, we have Mr. Barlow.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Ricard and your staff, for being here today to answer some of our questions.

As much as we think we're very important as members of Parliament, I think the number one thing our constituents and Canadians want is service from their government. This report on these call centres is extremely disconcerting. I would say it's completely unacceptable for the Government of Canada to have this kind of service for our constituents and for Canadians, who are the people they should be answering to. I really do appreciate the work you've done on this to highlight the shortcomings within our call centres, and to give us some opportunities, hopefully, to address some ways that we can try to remedy those.

The one thing that jumped out at me from your report was that ESDC was the department that wasn't complying with some of the guidelines when it came to your audit. It was refusing some of the recommendations that you're putting forward, saying that it doesn't track dropped calls or have standards or anything like that. Was there any reason that it decided it wasn't going to comply? Is that something it can do?

[Sylvain Ricard]

We are of the view that, based on our review of best practices, it should be included. That's a question you could ask the department or government officials, I suppose. We believe in full transparency in disclosing the results that they're achieving on a service like this one. That's why we referred in our report to the importance of having service standards that are based on consulting Canadians on their needs, making those service standards public so that they know the service levels they should expect and then reporting on performance against those.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

As part of your report, you also mentioned that the Liberal government had made a commitment to upgrade the 221 call centres, but only eight have been done. Have there been any plans or a concrete strategy to complete the other 213 upgrades? You were talking about the lack of resources there or up-to-date technology. As part of your report, was there any plan for completing the upgrades on the other 213 call centres?

[Sylvain Ricard]

In the report—and I'll ask Monsieur Goulet to correct me if I'm wrong—we referred to the fact that all 221 were supposed to be finished by 2020. That was the original plan of Shared Services Canada. It realized that it had underestimated the level of effort, the complexity, the cost and the need for preparing the various players in the process. It realized that it could only do eight of the 221 by 2020 rather than all of them. At the time of the audit, there was no plan for the remainder.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

As part of your report, you also mentioned the request for an additional $10.8 million to be able to complete your mandate. Could you explain why you need that additional $10.8 million to do the other audits that your department has been legislated to do?

[Sylvain Ricard]

The former Auditor General submitted a request for additional funding through the budget process. He wrote to the Minister of Finance in 2017 as part of the 2018 budget process and identified a need for, I think—I'm going on my memory here—$21 million. We got some of it. We got $8 million in the 2018 budget. He wrote again last summer for not quite all of the difference because everything had evolved in the meantime. He didn't ask for the full difference; he asked for a little bit less than that. The difference would have been $13 million and he asked for $10.8 million. That's basically to be able to deliver on our mandate.

Much of our mandate is mandatory, such as auditing the financial statements of the various organizations. We can't not do them. The number increased. We also have an additional mandate related to the commissioner of the environment, where we have to do some work. In the past there were, I think, 26 entities that we had to review. I think it's now up to 93. It's all of those challenges, along with updating our technology, which is outdated. We need all of those things done to be able to deliver on our mandate.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

This report on the call centres shows how important the Office of the Auditor General is to highlight where we have shortfalls within government. Again, I was astonished with the results of your audit on the call centres. It is completely unacceptable for Canadians that they're getting this kind of horrific service—and I would call it horrific.

From my understanding, never in Canadian government history has an Auditor General not been able to fulfill their mandate, and funding goes up and down. What has changed? Is it just a matter that your workload has increased that substantially under the current mandate? Before, the Auditor General would do 25 audits per year. Now you're down to 14. Is it just a matter of an additional workload?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's actually the time, but I'll give you an opportunity for a very quick answer.

[Sylvain Ricard]

Very briefly, there are kind of two drivers. We need to update our technology and our tools to perform audit work in order to align with new technology that is out there where we perform audits, and yes, additional mandates have been given to us over the years.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

MP Ruimy, please.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you for being here today.

Clearly, looking at the report, it's quite an eye-opener for a lot of folks.

I'm a numbers guy, and when I start looking at this, the first thing that comes to mind, knowing that this government has reinvested more money into call centres and hiring more people, is whether there has been an improvement from the last time a report like this was completed.

[Sylvain Ricard]

The one I'll mention wasn't on them. We had a similar type of audit on call centres for CRA, two or three years ago.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

How do we know whether we're making progress on this? From the minister's numbers, the number of calls answered has increased by more than 850,000 since 2014, from 3.8 million to 4.6 million. I keep seeing that there's a number that's missing. There are about 13 million calls, I think, that are not being accounted for or weren't there. I'm trying to understand how these numbers all work together.

[Sylvain Ricard]

I'm not quite sure what number you're referring to. I think you asked a question about how we know that we have improved. We need service standards in place. There's a policy from Treasury Board secretariat for a reason. You need service standards in place—

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

I agree.

[Sylvain Ricard]

To establish those service times, you need to have consulted Canadians to know what they expect and what they need, and you make your decision about the service level you want to have in place.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Are you suggesting that there have not been any service standards? The way you're saying it is like we have no service standards.

[Sylvain Ricard]

Yes.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

What's happened over the last 10 years?

[Sylvain Ricard]

In our audit, we do mention, regarding the three service standards that are required under the TBS policy, for two of those service standards there was none, and for the other one, one of the entities had no service standards.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

When was that determined? I'm struggling to understand why, all of a sudden, now we're talking about not having service standards when, to me, it's something that should have been in place many years ago.