Evidence of meeting #10 for Public Accounts in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cases.
A video is available from Parliament.
Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
—but to perhaps make a bit of a larger point, this was a relatively small number of cases. There were only 137 over the two fiscal years.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON
That said, the amount of time that it takes for cases that have no legal or medical complexity does contribute to a backlog for other cases that do require more complex consideration, and that does speak to the administrative efficiency of the process.
There's been some dispute over how many cases per month a tribunal member should be able to conclude. How many cases per month was the legacy body completing per member, per month, prior to the creation of the Social Security Tribunal?
Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Mr. Chair, unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to answer that question. Our audit only included the period from April 1, 2012, and it looked at the new tribunal.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON
Deputy Shugart, would it be possible for your department to look at historical records and share with this committee the average number of cases concluded by members of the legacy tribunal prior to the creation of the Social Security Tribunal?
Deputy Minister, Department of Employment and Social Development
I will take that as notice, Chair. I would perhaps, in consultation with the chair, want as much of our resources to be devoted to proceeding with our action plan, so I wouldn't want to lose too much time in that regard, frankly, but we will undertake to provide that as well as we can.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you very much.
Unfortunately, our time is up or close to up, but first of all, thanks to all of you for coming.
To our Auditor General, thank you again for your report, Mr. Ferguson. Certainly we can see where there has been some success here now, but we still hope for more.
To that end, Mr. Shugart, would it be possible to get a progress report in, say, six months in regard to the backlog and also in regard to the client contact that we have? I know that you've said here that you want to improve on that.
Also, with regard to the approval rate of some of these cases, I'd be interested to know...I don't know if you'd call it the denial rate, but I'd be interested to know the approval rate.
As well, you said that by October you are going to have the service standards in place but that they may be published even sooner than that. When you say “published”, is that public?
Deputy Minister, Department of Employment and Social Development
It is public.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
It's public. I guess our analysts can be watching for that so that we can be aware of that service standard.
Thank you. I would expect that six or seven months down the road you may want to come back or at least give us a bit of a report on how things have proceeded over the coming six months.
Thank you for coming. Thank you, committee, for good questions and good work.
The meeting is adjourned.