Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation to appear before your committee today.
I will very briefly outline how we, at the Treasury Board Secretariat, are addressing the Auditor General's recommendation regarding the Beyond the Border Action Plan, and briefly discuss our approach to managing horizontal initiatives.
Horizontal initiatives allow the government to leverage the attention, the efforts, and the resources of multiple departments and stakeholders to achieve shared outcomes. Each horizontal initiative has a lead department responsible for coordination and reporting. In addition, an interdepartmental governing committee is generally established to ensure the initiative is well managed.
While horizontal initiatives can have value, they also come with certain challenges. First, it can be difficult to ensure coordination, consistency, and validation of data collection analysis and reporting across many departments. This effort takes resources, time, and learning to work across different management structures and organizational cultures of the lead and partner departments.
Second, there can also be challenges in developing appropriate performance indicators that measure real outcomes rather than simply inputs and outputs.
Third, horizontal initiatives are often complements to existing programs and it can therefore be difficult at times to separate the results achieved with the top-up or incremental funding from that of the program's ongoing funding.
Over the years, the Treasury Board Secretariat has worked to address these challenges, and improve management and reporting on horizontal initiatives. In addition to requiring lead departments to report on progress in their performance reports to Parliament, we have set up a horizontal initiative database and, more recently, issued a guide on the management and reporting of horizontal initiatives.
In its fall 2016 report the Auditor General found that there was room for improvement in this guidance. In particular, the Auditor General recommended that TBS clarify reporting roles and responsibilities, clarify guidance for lead and partner departments with respect to reporting a consolidated view of progress, and clarify the requirements of a financial costing framework for horizontal initiatives.
We fully support these recommendations.
As an initial step in responding to the recommendation of the Auditor General, we have implemented a requirement for the 2017-18 departmental plans that requires departments to report on the total spending of each horizontal initiative. This will help to provide a consolidated view of the progress made.
We are also leveraging the new Treasury Board policy on results that came into effect in summer 2016 to clarify results expectations of programs and improve the quality of program outcomes and performance indicators.
This will allow the secretariat to improve its monitoring function to better track performance and costing information of horizontal initiatives. This approach will also allow us to integrate the horizontal initiatives database with the TBS information base tool, and if you don't know that tool, I commend it to you.
In this way, we expect to present information in a clearer, easier to navigate format that would have the dual effect of increasing accessibility to horizontal information and improving reporting on progress results and costs to Canadians and parliamentarians.
Finally, the Treasury Board Secretariat is reviewing the guide on the management and reporting of horizontal initiatives that was promulgated in 2014 and we are working with departments and agencies to identify critical areas that require improved instruments and guidance. We plan on completing modifications to this guidance this calendar year.
This concludes my brief overview of our progress in managing and reporting on horizontal initiatives, and the steps we are putting in place to improve the quality and transparency of information in response to the Auditor General's recommendation.
Following additional introductory remarks from my colleagues, I'd be happy to address any questions you have on TBS's role in horizontal initiatives.