Evidence of meeting #93 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 audit.
A video is available from Parliament.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
We can get you the details of that, but again, we put a lot of effort into that language training.
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
In the last year, when you recruited, I'm sure you must have acquired quite a number of people. How many unilingual candidates were recruited?
Principal, Human Resources, Office of the Auditor General
One of our main intakes of new employees is our student recruiting, where we recruit right out of university, meaning new people with a new master's degree—
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
But the students will not automatically come into the full-time job positions. Is that right?
Principal, Human Resources, Office of the Auditor General
When I say the “students”, it's a development program.
Sylvain Ricard Assistant Auditor General, Corporate Services, and Chief Financial Officer, Office of the Auditor General
That's right. They receive all the training, so they are permanent and full-time employees.
Principal, Human Resources, Office of the Auditor General
Exactly. Those who continue on and achieve their CPA are automatically hired. Everyone who is hired as a performance auditor would have a two-year development program and would become....
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
Compared to last year, what is your budget for language training this year?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
We spent $2 million on language training.
Liberal
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
It's essentially the same. It's about $2 million. We budgeted around $2 million and we spent $2 million.
Liberal
Liberal
Chandra Arya Liberal Nepean, ON
One of your reports shows that the total number of staff has been reduced from 570 to 550. Why is that?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
There will be various different things. We have to put more effort into our IT, and there are other types of costs that we have to cover, and so to work within our budget, we have to reduce a number of staff.
If you're talking about the upcoming fiscal year, if that is the 550 number you're referring to, remember as well that the numbers we are presenting here are just based on the main estimates number, because that's what the committee needs to approve, the main estimates number. The 550 that we are projecting is based on what is included in our main estimates, with the additional $8.3 million, which will come through in a supplementary estimate. We will be able to hire some more staff with that as well, so we will be able to increase the numbers once that happens, but that happens through a different process.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Liberal Alexandra Mendes
Thank you very much, Mr. Ferguson.
We have Mr. Nuttall for four minutes. Are you sharing your time with Mr. McCauley?
Conservative
Alex Nuttall Conservative Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, I will be splitting my time with Mr. McCauley.
I have a follow-up question, and perhaps it's just to provoke thought rather than to get a definitive answer on it. You go through the auditing process, which we know is incredibly important to Canadians, to our democracy, and to ensuring that there's not an abuse of power either by politicians or by bureaucrats, or that the rules that are intended to be followed are indeed followed.
Have you considered including a return on investment line in each of the audits that you complete? Not all of them are going to be winners. In business you don't win every time. But when I look at things like the payment system—Phoenix and others—I see that the return on investment can be humongous. In other places, where you're talking about a million dollar program, you might spend a lot of money in considering the program, but you still need to do that to ensure that the processes within those departments are actually being followed.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
I guess I'll say that I wish it were easy to put a dollar number on every part of an audit. That's what we struggle with. For example, we did an audit a while back on Border Services, and I think we identified at the time that about 700,000 people had come into Canada without showing a passport or without the agents recording a passport or other identification for those individuals. I don't know where it is now, but I'm assuming that the Border Services Agency has tightened that up, and that if you went in and looked now there would be, hopefully, an indication of who actually came across the border in every case.
Well, how do you put a dollar value on something like that? That's the hard part of this. I'll go back to our audits of the financial statements of the Government of Canada. Again I'm not sure exactly how much it costs us, but it's the most expensive audit that we do, the audit of the financial statements of the Government of Canada. We'll have a hearing on that when we do the public accounts hearing. If we were not doing that, what would be the impact? In the course of that audit, we find some things but we don't find a lot of things, because over time proper internal controls have been put in place to manage money. Yes, we will find things, but they will be much less than what it costs us to do the audit. Again, how do you put a value on the deterrent effect of having us come in and do that audit?
There are times when we have audits and we do find actual places where dollars can be saved, and that then puts a focus on it. But a lot of our audits actually, quite frankly, do result in the government ending up spending money in order to fix something. I wish there was an easy way to put a simple return on investment number on them, but I haven't figured it out yet.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
It's wonderful to have you here. I echo my colleagues' comments about the great work you do.
In your departmental report you state that the growing size of government spending, an increase of $50 billion per year over a couple of years, increases the audit universe for finance and performance audits, as well as the added complexity.
I want to bring this to the new estimates, in which the government has introduced vote 40, which the PBO calls a blank cheque for $7 billion of spending. I'm wondering if you could give us your view on this new central vote and on how it will affect your ability to audit when there is no control, so to speak, over it. There are no further votes on it or oversight.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Well, what we end up auditing is how money is spent. However the money is allocated out of a central budget pool, it will be allocated to departments to do certain things. Once it gets allocated to departments, that's really when our work kicks in. We don't audit the budget allocation process; we audit the actual spending.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
That's after the fact, but as our Auditor General who studies government spending with the mandate, obviously, to get bang for the dollar for Canadian taxpayers, are you concerned with this new weight of a vote that is lumped into Treasury Board to spend out without any further visits to committee or parliamentary votes?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Again, it's not something we have examined, but for any type of audit, if we were looking at a budgeting process, we'd go back to the requirements in the Financial Administration Act: what needs to be appropriated, whether it is clear what the money is supposed to be used for, how the money is budgeted for, what the money is supposed to be allocated to, and whether there are appropriate systems and controls in place to make sure the money is allocated that way.
I can't give you a comment on any particular item in the budget because we haven't audited it, but those are the types of things we would look for, whether there is a system in place that will make sure that the money is being allocated to respect all of the appropriate legal authorities underlying it.