But it's centralized—
Evidence of meeting #69 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 data.
A video is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #69 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 data.
A video is available from Parliament.
10:30 a.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Health
It's kind of centralized. The forms they're using, the fields, and the system and kinds of the process they follow are the same.
I don't want to give the impression that we're all running it out of—
10:30 a.m.
President, Canadian Food Inspection Agency
Very briefly, Mr. Chair, in response to the questions, as my colleagues have said, we've put a lot of emphasis on prevention, on training, to make sure that people understand their responsibilities.
As Deputy Kennedy said, we've gone to one system. We realized that there were too many, so we have one system. We have a centre of expertise that looks at this to make sure the fields are populated correctly. If we feel there's contract splitting, they don't allow the procurement person to go to that next step.
The oversight is centralized. What's decentralized is that managers are encouraged to manage, to make their own procurement needs. But we've standardized the system. We have a central sort of challenge function that is helping us make sure the data is there that we need, that it's standardized. Then they're the ones who are tasked with doing the data mining to make sure things are working the way they should.
We're also borrowing, as the auditor said, from the financial sector, to look at control frameworks, the stress test, how we do our data mining, what we should be looking for, and working with our departmental audit committee in that same respect.
10:30 a.m.
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
Risk management is the management of uncertainty. That's what risk is. The member is absolutely right; things will happen. You look for the anomalies. These standardized systems—the use of dashboards in, say, project management—are becoming more pervasive in departments. They are very useful tools; they flag things that seem wrong.
I agree with you entirely, that's what you watch for. It's certainly how I spend a lot of my time.
10:35 a.m.
Conservative
10:35 a.m.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Maybe we'll just take a glimpse into the future of audit. We've been doing some work over the years with standard audit language, to highlight anomalies that are worth looking into. This is an area that is exploding from an artificial intelligence perspective. Frankly, if you look five years out, you will see this type of analytics applied to almost every transaction, to highlight the risky ones.
We are doing a pilot. We have one brave chief audit executive who has agreed to do a pilot using one of these more advanced artificial intelligence tools on their organization, to be able to say how it works. It is going to change the nature of how we audit. Some of the lessons we learn can, I think, be applied to looking at program data as well.
10:35 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you very much.
We are pretty well out of time.
First of all I should say to Mr. Matthews, congratulations. I don't know how many years you have been in Treasury Board, but—
10:35 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
—many, many years. Mr. Matthews will become senior associate deputy minister for the Department of National Defence, as of October 23. Congratulations on that.
10:35 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Maybe there are others of you who are off. I'm not aware. I apologize if there are.
Thank you for appearing before us today.
To the public who might be watching on television today, I just want to conclude by saying that generally speaking, Canadians should rightfully be concerned when they hear of risks of fraud. Compared to many other countries, Canada is a gold standard. Part of the reason we are is the exercise that you have watched today on television or you've been here to see today. We have an Auditor General who has gone through and offered a report on managing the risk of fraud. You've seen five deputy ministers in charge of their departments, here today explaining their action plan, how to manage it and fight the potential fraud, whether it's in immigration, or procurement, or indigenous affairs, or wherever.
Now the public accounts committee has taken the Auditor's General report and asked for the action plan, and is following up on the action plan that Canadians really expect their government to do. I want to thank you for being a part of the formula of making some headway here.
To the committee, I will underscore what Mr. Christopherson, Mr. Nuttall, Ms. Shanahan, and others have said: it's been a good two days here on this issue, Tuesday and today.
Thank you very much for doing it.
To the committee, thank you for your very good work.
We're suspended. We're going to go in camera.
[Proceedings continue in camera]
