Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We thank you for this opportunity to present the results of chapter 5 of our 2009 fall report entitled “Acquiring Military Vehicles for Use in Afghanistan”.
As you mentioned, I am accompanied today by Hugh McRoberts, an assistant auditor general, and Jerome Berthelette, the assistant auditor general who was the principal for the audits of National Defence when we did this work.
This represents the first of several audits on military acquisitions that my office is undertaking. We are currently completing an audit on the acquisition of military helicopters to be reported to Parliament in the fall of this year.
The acquisition of military equipment involves several federal departments. National Defence has overall responsibility for setting military requirements and managing the acquisition projects, while Public Works and Government Services Canada, as the contracting authority, manages the contracting process.
Mr. Chair, we looked at four urgent projects, each costing over $100 million, to acquire military vehicles to improve operational capability and protect soldiers in Afghanistan. The projects involved the acquisition of replacement tanks, armoured patrol vehicles, armoured heavy support vehicles, and light armoured vehicles with remote weapons stations.
We examined how National Defence managed the projects to ensure that the acquisitions met government policies related to project management and that the vehicles it was purchasing would meet the Canadian Forces' urgent operational needs. We also examined how National Defence and PWGSC worked together to ensure that the contracting for the projects complied with government policies.
In three of the four projects we examined, National Defence and PWGSC provided the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan with urgently needed vehicles that National Defence determined met the operational needs.
The fourth project, acquiring the LAV-RWS vehicles, slipped behind schedule and the vehicles were not delivered to Afghanistan until after our audit was completed.
For the two competitive contracting processes that we examined, we found that both processes were managed in compliance with applicable contracting policies. However, none of the four projects was managed in accordance with National Defence's project approval guide. The problem that National Defence faced is that its guide did not have a separate process to deal with urgent operational requirements and it gave no guidance on which of the many required elements could be abbreviated or in fact even abandoned in the face of urgent needs.
We recommended that National Defence take the opportunity to apply its experience from these projects to assessing the elements of the guide to determine which elements may be safely modified or deleted in the face of urgent need, as well as whether some are needed at all, regardless of urgency.
In January, Mr. Chair, during my visit to Afghanistan, we had the opportunity to see this equipment and to speak to the soldiers who use this equipment on a daily basis. What the soldiers told us about how the vehicles were meeting operational needs was consistent with what we reported in this audit.
Mr. Chair, we are pleased to report that both National Defence and PWGSC agreed with our recommendations. The two departments have shared their action plans with us and we believe these plans have the potential to address the issues raised in this chapter.
However, the work on this audit was completed in May 2009 and we have not audited actions taken by the departments since then. Your committee may wish to have the departments reports on progress and the results they are achieving.
Mr. Chair this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions. Thank you.