Human Resources Committee on June 6th, 2019

[Sylvain Ricard]

Yes, with the exception of the CRA audit done two years ago. That's my recollection.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Right, okay.

From what I understand—and please correct me if I'm wrong—the workload has increased because your office is receiving more legislative mandates for audits from the House of Commons.

[Sylvain Ricard]

I'm afraid I have to start to expand a little bit here. It's a complicated story in the sense that it has many drivers. Yes, there are more mandates in terms of more entities and different entities.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Yes.

[Sylvain Ricard]

There is a level of complexity in the business of some of those entities. When you audit entities that are in the business of financial instruments, it gets very technical. The world has evolved significantly in terms of investment and the types of transaction they do. You're facing more and more artificial intelligence types of contexts. I'm not suggesting that it's all over the place, everywhere you go, but we're comparing ourselves and reaching out to private sector colleagues and finding out our methodology is based on that of one of the big firms. Having reached out to them we do realize that we're behind in terms of our audit approach.

I'll leave it at that, because I could probably go on for two hours trying to describe the whole business case that was put together or described by the former auditor general to explain why he felt strongly that he had a need for $21 million.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Okay.

You mentioned that there was an increase of more than 93 audits. Given the conversation with Mr. Kelly and his question, how is the priority for which audit is going to be done determined?

[Sylvain Ricard]

Again, as a matter of transparency, if there's one organization that has to believe in transparency, it's us. It's not 93 new audits per se. It's 93 entities that are subject to the review that we have to do. We were already doing that audit, but that audit is becoming four times bigger—from 20-something to 90-something.

Sorry, I lost track of your question line when I took that detour.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

How are they prioritized?

[Sylvain Ricard]

Oh, yes. Thank you.

There are two or three ways. First, we have what we call mandatory audits—some audits that were given to us by legislation. We have no choice but to audit, I'll say, 60 financial statements for organizations. It's 40, 50, or 60. I forget the number right now. For those, we don't have a choice. We have to do them. Crown corporations are subject to special exams once every 10 years. We have that calendar, that program, whereby we do so many a year to be able to go at them once every 10 years.

Then we have those types of audits that you're reviewing today—and I'm oversimplifying here, obviously—for which, with the remainder of the resources we have—because the others are mandatory, and we have no choice about doing them—we go through a risk analysis process. We're trying to select audits that would have a bigger impact or benefit or value to Canadians. In a nutshell, I would describe the selection process in the words I've just used.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Okay. Thank you.

Would there be any plans for the office to conduct a follow-up audit with regard to ensuring compliance with the recommendations on this call centre audit that was just completed?

[Sylvain Ricard]

It's too soon for us to confirm whether there will be a follow-up audit. It will be part of the selection process I just referred to a minute ago in future years to situate this relative to other priorities.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

If you do a follow-up audit, is there usually an average year down the road?

[Sylvain Ricard]

It's a bit difficult to go with an average. Obviously we wouldn't go at it right away, because we know through the action plans.... Maybe one way to answer on this one would be to adhere to the action plans and the timelines they have there. We shouldn't go back before they can make the change or we will end up with the same picture.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

MP Dusseault, go ahead for three minutes, please.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to quickly come back to the issue of call centre capacity. That's the excuse used by the government to say that the number of calls exceeds the technological capacity of the call centres.

However, the statistics indicate that Veterans Affairs Canada seems to be using technology that allows it to answer all calls, at least as a first step since all calls are have been routed, according to the graph you provided to us.

How did the other three departments justify the lack of capacity of their call centres? Were they really technological limitations that made it possible to manage such a volume of calls or rather an imposed constraint that redirects all calls elsewhere beyond a maximum number programmed into the system? Can you tell us more about that?

[Jean Goulet]

Our audit didn't focus on that specific aspect. But during our discussions, we learned that it was a combination of factors, including the availability of resources, but also the age of the technology used for call centres, which doesn't always allow for additional resources or the management of incoming calls. All these factors, taken together or individually, affect the ability to answer incoming calls.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Ultimately, it's more an issue of resources than the number of agents available. Does the telephone system technology create a problem? For example, if 200,000 calls arrive in the same amount of time, will there be a problem with the 200,001th call?

[Jean Goulet]

This may be a combination of both factors, a lack of human resources and technological limitations. To give you a hypothetical example, some of the EI call centres don't have the ability to transfer calls they couldn't handle to another centre due to lack of resources and would have to abandon these calls.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

I would like to know if, internally, the department or call centre can decide not to answer calls over a certain number and instead redirect them to the website or other options. Is a decision being made somewhere to determine the number of calls over which there aren't enough staff to meet the 10-minute service deadline and people need to be redirected elsewhere?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Be very brief, please.

[Jean Goulet]

We haven't checked this aspect.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

That brings us to the end of round two.

Just to confirm, we have you until 12:30 p.m., I believe, so we have time to do a third round, if the committee desires.

I have MP Diotte up first, for six minutes.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Mr. Ricard, the work you do is invaluable. I think everybody in this room has had frustration with call centres, whether of a government department, a bank, a retailer, or whatever. I think that regardless of our political stripes we all want to solve this. I'm sure your work is a good start to doing so.

It seems pretty clear that we need to get some benchmarking done for these call centres. I think you mentioned that Canadians expect a call to be answered within seven minutes.

What is best practice in the industry? Have you looked around? Have you gauged it in the private sector or in other levels of government, etc.?