Evidence of meeting #151 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was calls.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:25 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
Thank you, Chair.
My question is to Monsieur Richard.
You focused a lot on the requirement to update technology within these call centres. As you were doing your audit, would you have established a baseline for the technology that was being used before the five-year process began? I assume you would have been auditing the five-year modernization of these call centres.
11:25 a.m.
Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
No, we didn't audit the technology or the transformation initiative or any of that. We looked at, I guess I'll say it this way, the planning of it.
11:25 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
So your focus was all on the plan, not where it started and where it was attempting to get to?
11:25 a.m.
Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
No. It was about the following. Is something being done? Where are we? How much progress has been made? It was those types of things, and not the technology for the technology.
11:25 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
Would you have analyzed as well the personnel who were assigned to handle these? For each of these issues, while you may have modernized technology, one of the key aspects of service would be the ability to have people on the end answering those inquiries. Were you able to establish the change over that five-year modernization period in the number of agents assigned? Was that a field or a scope that you would have looked at?
11:25 a.m.
Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Sorry, I'm not sure I quite understand the question. Is it about the staff on the modernization project?
11:25 a.m.
Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Okay. Again, we didn't analyze that. We've turned to the organizations, to the departments, asking what's being done here, who's doing what, whether it has proper planning and so on and so forth.
11:25 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
Okay. You're looking at the statistical side of what their policy was in place.
11:25 a.m.
Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
We've asked them: Are you planning for this? Where have you started? What's happening? They've realized that they underestimated the level of complexity and the level of effort to deliver the project. They will now have to turn to replan the whole initiative, because as we mentioned in the report, at the time of the audit, there was no plan for the remainder, the 230 call centres that had not been modernized.
11:30 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
In your opening statements, I'm not sure if you elaborated. You say you made five recommendations, including two to Employment and Social Development Canada. Did you outline what the two—I'm curious about the two recommendations you made to Employment and Social Development Canada.
11:30 a.m.
Principal, Performance Audit, Audit Operations, Office of the Auditor General
Basically the first recommendation is that some departments, including Employment and Social Development Canada, should review how they manage incoming calls to improve access to agents. They should consider practices such as allowing callers to decide if they prefer to wait, use cell service options or have the call centre call them back later.
The second one, again going to the department and other departments as well, is that they should set call service standards that are relevant to clients and consider client feedback as per Treasury Board guidelines on service, and that they should publish call centre standards and performance results in a transparent and consistent manner and verify the results to confirm accuracy.
11:30 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
Did they have a process in place to document or analyze any client feedback?
11:30 a.m.
Principal, Performance Audit, Audit Operations, Office of the Auditor General
They have a quality control mechanism in place, yes, but we did not audit that.
11:30 a.m.
Principal, Performance Audit, Audit Operations, Office of the Auditor General
No, we can't really comment.
11:30 a.m.
Principal, Performance Audit, Audit Operations, Office of the Auditor General
That's right. The only thing we can say to that is that this is one of the standards the guideline recommends, which is the accuracy standard. None of the departments we audited had an accuracy standard.
11:30 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
Again, you may have answered this question earlier, but when was the last time the scope of audit that you're currently reporting on would have been done, if ever, on the similar centres or departments?
11:30 a.m.
Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
That's the first audit we did on that—
11:30 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
This was the first. This establishes a benchmark of numbers and statistics.
11:30 a.m.
Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
—unless I'm forgetting something from many, many years ago.
11:30 a.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
But I'm talking about the past 10 years, so this is the first critical analysis, detailed analysis, of the government's ability to deliver in this area.
11:30 a.m.
Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
As I said earlier, except the CRA one, which we did a few years ago.
