Evidence of meeting #6 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 military.
A video is available from Parliament.
10:30 a.m.
Liberal
10:30 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Forces Housing Agency, Department of National Defence
To give you a number, we turn over about 3,500 families a year out of 12,000. There's a lot of movement every year. Some people, though, have longer postings than others, so they may stay longer, but it could be two or three years. They may decide to move when the economy.... Again, it's totally their choice. If they have longer postings, they may decide to buy a house as opposed to renting. That's an option for them. Or they may decide to rent in the economy as well, depending on their particular circumstances.
10:30 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you.
It's back to our Auditor General. We're out of time on that question, but we'll....
10:30 a.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
I'll just start by saying that before I became a civil servant and joined the civil service in the province of New Brunswick, early in my career I worked in the private sector in an accounting firm. One of the reasons I changed careers was that I wasn't very good at income tax.
10:30 a.m.
Some hon. members
Oh, oh!
10:30 a.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
To the question that you asked, it wasn't something we specifically looked at. Certainly there is always a risk when an employer is providing a benefit to an employee that there could be a taxable benefit, but I couldn't give you an opinion on whether there's an issue here or not, because as you well know, the Income Tax Act is quite complex, and you would have to go through all of that. It wasn't part of what we looked at in the audit, and I really wouldn't be able to give you an opinion on it.
10:30 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
We'll go back to Ms. Zahid. She had a question. Questions are being answered as we go here, so we're down to the last questions.
10:30 a.m.
Liberal
Salma Zahid Liberal Scarborough Centre, ON
I have one good question.
As per paragraph 5.54, the OAG recommended that the agency “should regularly capture and update its condition assessment information to ensure it is accurate and available to inform decisions.” Perhaps the Auditor General could share with the committee some examples of information used by the agency that, in his opinion, was not reliable.
10:35 a.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Again, I think it goes to what we mentioned particularly in paragraph 5.51, where we say that they use information from a national database to set priorities for their annual spending plan, but at that time, the information was not always reliable. The agency told us that the information wasn't regularly updated as required, and that the information had not been updated since October 2014 because of software concerns. When we were in doing the audit, it was difficult to find that type of information, and the information didn't exist at that time in the database.
We've since heard today that they've made changes and put in place a system. In terms of problems with the accuracy, it was simply that we were trying to get access to that information through the national database, and it wasn't available at the time we did the audit.
10:35 a.m.
Liberal
Salma Zahid Liberal Scarborough Centre, ON
Are you satisfied with the department updating that information annually, or do you think you would need biannual or quarterly updates on the information?
10:35 a.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
It's the type of information that, with the way information systems work today, you would expect the information would be updated as it becomes available.
Again, there are a few aspects to maintaining information in this type of a database. One is making sure that at the moment the information is captured, it is captured and available to be used, and it's easily accessible once it has been captured. Again, as I mentioned earlier, another aspect is also to make sure there's a quality control system in place to make sure that as information is being captured, it is accurately entered, and you don't have conflicting information or you're not entering things like, for example, a furnace that was added to a particular unit, but you've put in the wrong unit, and it was actually added to a different unit. How do you make sure you have quality control over the data? I think that's the other aspect that would be important here.
10:35 a.m.
Liberal
Paul Lefebvre Liberal Sudbury, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to follow up on the chair's comments regarding the time you will need to develop your plan. We are talking about 2017 and 2019 before we see a more concrete plan we could follow.
I would like to ask the Auditor General whether other departments take years to develop concrete plans, and whether this is normal?
10:35 a.m.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Often, it is difficult to prepare a complete plan. So it is not surprising to hear that it will take a certain time to prepare a complete plan. I have no comments to make on the time needed to complete such a plan.
10:35 a.m.
Liberal
Paul Lefebvre Liberal Sudbury, ON
I will now address the representatives of the Department of National Defence.
Who is working on this plan at this time? The time required to develop it is important. Why will it take so long?
10:35 a.m.
Deputy Commander, Military Personnel Command, Department of National Defence
The best way to respond to your question is to say that it's actually a two-pronged plan. We have two phases and they can be somewhat concurrent, but the reality is that step one is we need to identify what the operational need. The first step in that initial phase, in fact, is doing a scientific assessment based on the pillars in the foundation that I discussed earlier. The second step is to actually draft the policy. Drafting the policy takes time, to be frank, and we're going to have to go to the Treasury Board, and that also takes time.
Once we have the policy in place, we can hand it over to CFHA, which can then put its real estate plan into effect.
10:35 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Forces Housing Agency, Department of National Defence
I'd like to add to this.
We work in parallel. It is not as though I were waiting for this with my arms crossed. We will certainty work in parallel, except that we must have an approved policy that reflects the direction the government wants to take.
10:35 a.m.
Liberal
10:40 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Forces Housing Agency, Department of National Defence
There is one.
10:40 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Forces Housing Agency, Department of National Defence
It has to be reviewed, and the changes may be quite substantive given the operational needs.
10:40 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Forces Housing Agency, Department of National Defence
There is an internal consultation.
10:40 a.m.
Liberal
Paul Lefebvre Liberal Sudbury, ON
And where are you on that? What is going on? Who is working on this plan?
