Mr. Chairman, Thank you for this opportunity to discuss Chapter 3 of our 2010 fall report, Service Delivery.
Joining me at the table are Marian McMahon, Assistant Auditor General, who was responsible for the portion of the audit that examined the Canada Revenue Agency, and Glenn Wheeler, Principal, who was also responsible for the audit.
All Canadians require the services of the federal government at one time or another, and research indicates that they expect high-quality service. At the same time, the government must balance clients' needs with policy requirements and available resources.
Our audit looked at the practices used by three organizations—Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency—to set their service standards, monitor and report on their service performance and act on this information to improve service quality.
We found that two organizations we examined, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency, have adequate practices in place to manage their service delivery, while a third, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, has yet to establish service standards for some of its major programs. We understand that the committee would like to focus today on the portion of the audit that examines Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada has been working to develop service standards since 2007. In April 2010 the department published a preliminary set of service standards and associated targets for four business lines.
This set of standards is very limited considering that the department provides more than 35 different services. There are no standards for some major services--for example, the citizenship program. Without a complete set of standards, the department cannot comprehensively evaluate its service performance and may not be able to ensure a consistent level of service to its clients. In the absence of standards, the department was using operational data such as intake, output, processing time, and inventories to provide some indication of performance.
We recommended that Citizenship and Immigration Canada ensure that all channels of communication provide consistent information on the time it takes to process applications for citizenship and requests for citizenship certificates; that it establish and communicate a comprehensive set of service standards for all key services it delivers; that it monitor and report on its service performance against these standards; and that it collect and analyze client feedback and complaints to identify systemic service issues.
The department has developed an action plan in response to our recommendation. In particular, we note that it plans to develop a comprehensive set of service standards and to begin reporting externally on them by spring 2013.
Mr. Chairman, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions. Thank you.