Public Accounts Committee on June 2nd, 2016

[Michael Ferguson]

I think there are a couple of components to it. The first one would be that the issue was about, as you so rightly just identified, problem addresses. The fact an address is used by multiple people may not be a problem, but in these cases we were dealing with addresses that had been identified as problem addresses, and more work should have been done.

There are also cases where an address is used by multiple applicants. In that case, it should be noticed and a question should be asked, and maybe the address is okay. I think that just because an address is used by multiple people, and it's known to the department that it's used by multiple people because they're refugees or whatever, then that address for that reason should not end up on the list of problem addresses.

What we were concerned about was when an address ends up on a list of problem addresses, then how is the department managing that, how are the officers treating that, and are they doing all of the steps they should be doing when the department has already identified the address as problematic?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

It sounds as if even after being identified as a problem address, other officials for some reason didn't recognize it as a problem address.

[Michael Ferguson]

That was the point we were making. Either it was identified by the department as a problem address, but didn't end in the system flagged as a problem, or it did end up in the system flagged as a problem address when that person made their application and the system identified it as a problem, and the citizenship officer didn't take any additional steps to investigate the fact that the person had provided that particular address.

Certainly for us it wasn't an issue about multiple people using the address; it was when those addresses were identified as problem addresses. Then the types of things you're talking about weren't done, when we felt that the citizenship officer should have been doing them, making sure that the information was properly captured in the system, and that once it was properly captured, making sure that the follow-up procedures were done.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right. Thank you very much.

This concludes our very interesting meeting today. I think we all learned a lot. As I stated, in the future we'll be drawing up a report with recommendations. You may be required at a future date to provide us more information or to come back before our committee.

I would also give you and Auditor General the opportunity, if you leave this meeting and feel you didn't explain something quite the way you wanted, to send in more testimony or to follow up with our clerk. If that's the case, we would encourage you to do so.

We always check for such additional information when considering a report of ours. If there are other areas of concern that you had coming out of this meeting, we would also love to hear from you on that. We can then follow up on it in our report.

This committee is the follow-up to making certain that departments carry through on their pledges in response to the Auditor General's reports, and we take that very seriously.

We thank you for being here today, and we now adjourn this meeting.