Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We are pleased to have this opportunity to discuss our 2017-18 departmental results report and our 2019-20 departmental plan. With me today are Andrew Hayes, Deputy Auditor General; Lucie Cardinal, Assistant Auditor General of Corporate Services and Chief Financial Officer; Kim Leblanc, Principal of Human Resources; and Ron Bergin, Principal of Strategic Planning.
The Office of the Auditor General of Canada supports Parliament and territorial legislatures by providing independent and objective information, advice and assurance about government financial statements and the management of government programs.
The commissioner of the environment and sustainable development carries out our mandate related to the environment and sustainable development.
We conduct all of our audits in accordance with Canadian auditing standards. Our audits and our system of quality control are subject to internal practice reviews and to independent external reviews to provide assurance that you can rely on the quality of our work.
We also help to advance legislative audit methodology and accounting and auditing standards, and we work internationally to build our capacity and to promote better-managed and accountable international institutions.
Let me turn first to our 2017-2018 results report.
As shown in our financial statements, our net cost of operations was $94.2 million, and we employed the equivalent of 568 full-time employees, or FTEs.
With these resources, we delivered 90 financial audits, six special examinations, 19 performance audits, and our first annual commentary report on our financial audits. The Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development also published a collaborative report on climate change, working with provincial auditors general, and delivered a review of departmental progress in implementing sustainable development strategies and our annual report on environmental petitions.
This represents all planned audit work, except for our cancelled performance audits on federal science programs and on infrastructure on reserves; and our performance audit on federal scientific facilities where, instead of a tabled audit report, we issued a management letter at the conclusion of the audit.
In our results report, we note that parliamentary committees reviewed 88% of the reports we presented to Parliament in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. This represents an increase from 72% in the 2016-2017 fiscal year. In total, we participated in 52 parliamentary hearings and briefings on our audit work.
The mission of the Office of the Auditor General of Canada is to contribute to well-managed and accountable government for Canadians. To assess this, we measure whether all of our audit opinions on financial statements are unqualified, and whether all of our special examination reports identify no significant deficiencies. In the 2017-2018 fiscal year, we issued unqualified opinions on all but two, or 95%, of the financial statements we audited. In both cases, we are working with the organizations to address the issues we identified and can inform you that in one of those cases, we have since been able to issue an unqualified audit opinion.
For all six of the special examinations of Crown corporations that we reported in the 2017-18 fiscal year, we identified significant deficiencies. In addition to making recommendations to the corporations, we have since issued our first commentary report on these audits to bring our concern to the attention of Parliament. With the help of this committee we are seeking to improve the management systems, practices and controls in these corporations, particularly in areas that need government support to resolve the problems.
Our assessment of our own organizational performance was generally positive with no significant opportunities for improvement identified. In particular, in our internal practice reviews, which serve as a key quality control in our audit methodology, the reviewer found that our audit reports were appropriate and supported by proper evidence. Our 2017-18 results report includes several indicators of the impact of our work along with measures of our operational performance, which are provided in an appendix to this statement.
Let me turn now to our 2019-20 departmental plan. The Office of the Auditor General is funded through various appropriations and transfers. For the 2019-20 fiscal year, the program expenditures of the Office of the Auditor General under vote 1 of the main estimates for this committee to consider reporting to the House of Commons is $78 million. Our planned number of full-time equivalent employees is 580. Our strategic framework identifies a number of client, operational and people management objectives that we use to manage the office and direct our continuous improvement efforts
In the 2019-20 fiscal year we will focus most of our efforts on the following three objectives.
First, to ensure that we are financially well managed, we need to address the financial challenges we are facing. Although the 2018 federal budget provided us with some new ongoing funding, we did not get any of the new funding that we requested in the 2019 federal budget. We are continuing to explore our options to ensure we are properly funded and accountable only to Parliament. In the near term, we have no choice but to decrease the number of performance audits that we conduct.
Second, to develop and maintain a skilled and engaged workforce, we will better match our audit and support service requirements with the human resources we have available to do the work. We will continue to defer certain audit-related work where we can. We will also defer a number of projects in our support services.
Third, to ensure effective, efficient and accountable office governance and management, we will continue to enhance our information technology security controls. We also need to renew the IT infrastructure that supports our audits, and we have begun to implement a multi-year plan based on the resources that we have available. In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, we will complete the replacement of our human resources management system and begin to replace our audit management software.
In conclusion, the Office of the Auditor General thanks you for your ongoing support and use of our work. We look forward to continuing to serve you in the coming year.
We would be pleased to answer your questions.
