Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair.
We thank you for this opportunity to present the results of our follow-up audit of Passport Canada. As you mentioned, I'm accompanied today by Richard Flageole, Assistant Auditor General, and Paul Morse, the principal responsible for this audit.
In the audit we followed up the progress Passport Canada made in addressing the recommendations of our April 2005 report. In that report we noted that Passport Canada was struggling to meet the increasing security expectations and demands for responsive service and that significant improvements in the processes for determining passport entitlement were necessary. We conducted a follow-up audit at the request of this committee.
In our February 2007 report we found that in the relatively short interval between the original audit and the follow-up audit, Passport Canada has made satisfactory progress towards addressing many of our recommendations. The areas in which satisfactory progress has been made are set out in our report. However, we also found that a number of weaknesses remained in the critical areas of identity verification and security. Confirming that the applicants are Canadian citizens, are who they say they are, and are entitled to a Canadian passport is critical to the integrity of this travel document.
Passport Canada must rely on provincial and territorial registries and on Citizenship and Immigration Canada for data to verify birth and citizenship information. While Passport Canada accesses some of this data instantaneously through electronic links as part of a pilot project with two provinces, those being Alberta and British Columbia, it had not established the electronic links it needed with the other provinces and with Citizenship and Immigration Canada to ensure the integrity of basic identification data. This is a complex undertaking that requires cooperation of other government organizations at the federal, provincial, and territorial levels. In the meantime, examiners will continue to have difficulty confirming vital statistics.
To further strengthen its ability to assess entitlement, Passport Canada successfully integrated Correctional Service Canada information regarding persons on parole or incarcerated persons. However, it faced problems in effectively utilizing information provided by the Canadian Police Information Centre, also known as CPIC, to check for those individuals charged with serious crimes.
Security is another critical element affecting the integrity of the Canadian passport. Our follow-up audit found that Transport Canada had not conducted a detailed security risk assessment as we recommended in 2005. As part of our security concerns in 2005, we reported that the access granted to employees who operate the automated system that issues passports was poorly controlled. Although we expected that Passport Canada would have resolved these problems by the time of our follow-up audit, we found that this was not the case. Some individuals who are not examiners still have the critical access rights or the profile that allowed them to trigger production of a passport without authorization and independent verification.
Concerning service to clients, I would like to point out that our audit was completed in August 2006 well before the implementation of new requirements under the US Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. However, we looked at how Passport Canada was preparing for this initiative and expressed concern as to whether it was prepared to successful deal with the potential increasing demand.
Finally, it is important to note that our office has not performed any audit work on this entity since we published our follow-up report. In its response to our report, Passport Canada committed to regularly update its action plan to address the outstanding items pertaining to our original recommendations and to publish the update in its annual report. This committee may want to monitor progress and ensure that outstanding issues are being satisfactorily addressed—in particular issues surrounding security.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my opening statement. We would be pleased to answer your committee's questions.