Public Accounts Committee on March 11th, 2021

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Ms. Hogan, I really liked what I heard today. So I will start with a comment.

The members of the committee fought hard to get you additional money. You will understand that our expectations will also be higher than they have been in recent years, especially since there is so much work to be done.

I have a couple of questions for you.

You sometimes file several reports at the same time and we have to go through them all at the same time. You said that you intend to make several presentations over the course of the year. How will you determine the timing of your report submissions?

How will you present both the reports that address the response to COVID-19 and those that deal with the topics you choose, since the essence of the Office of the Auditor General is to initiate its own reports and carry out its own performance audits?

How will you evaluate, select and present all these reports in a fair and equitable manner so that you are not deprived of fulfilling your mandate properly, knowing that, as parliamentarians, we have all supported you to do your job better?

[Karen Hogan]

Thank you for the questions.

I will first answer the question about how we are going to table the reports. Under the Auditor General Act, we can table four reports a year in Parliament. We usually make sure to table one in the fall and one in the spring. These reports will not be related to COVID-19. The reports that I tabled in February are basically reports that should have been tabled last year that were on programs that were not related to COVID-19.

There is a section of the act that gives us permission to table something of significance in Parliament, if necessary. We will use this provision of the act to table reports related to COVID-19.

I will try to table the reports in small groups so that you can digest them. I think that is when the members of the parliamentary committees will be able to tell us whether the pace is too fast or not. My intention is to give you enough reports so that you can choose what you will look at, and not so that you are forced to look at only the reports that I table. That's the pace we'll have. I am willing to hear your comments, if you have any.

The balance between COVID-19-related reports and reports on other extremely important topics is a topic of discussion in my office. This morning, with the senior leadership of the office, I was just discussing how to divide our efforts between reports for the commissioner, reports that focus on regular programs, and reports on COVID-19. We have tried to allocate our staff to ensure that we touch all three areas in a balanced way. One topic may take precedence over another in a certain year, but we will try to maintain that balance. Finally, if, in a report that is not related to COVID-19, we find something related to the pandemic, we will try to look at it.

We will try to do all of this at a fairly steady pace.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

In your opinion, is it sufficient to table reports twice a year? Would you instead like the legislature to allow you to table a smaller number of reports more often?

Every time there are reports tabled by the Auditor General, the attention of all parliamentarians is obviously focused on the whole set of reports. As a result, important information is sometimes missed, whether it is positive or negative. Indeed, people will generally pay little attention to anything positive and focus more on the reports that contain hard-hitting items.

Do you think the Office of the Auditor General should be allowed to table reports in Parliament more often?

[Karen Hogan]

There are pros and cons to any decision.

Indeed, having the ability to file documents when they are ready would perhaps improve the review of a report. However, as you mentioned, there is a whole process when our office files a report. So having too many filings would perhaps be difficult for the government to manage.

We had one tabling in February and one in March. You will have to let us know if it is too much.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Hogan.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much, Mr. Berthold.

Our last questioner will be Mr. Sorbara.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Good morning, colleagues.

Good morning, Auditor General. I apologize for missing your introductory remarks. I had another set of responsibilities this morning.

There have been a lot of good questions from my colleagues this morning delving into the issues at hand and the role of the Auditor General and the environment that we're in. On Tuesday we had the deputy minister of finance at our committee. Like you, obviously, Mr. Sabia has had vast experience, I would say a treasure trove of experience, dealing with organizations and organizational complexity in every sort of capacity.

First, I thank Mr. Lawrence for commenting on this earlier. In the era of digitization, where we're working from a remote environment, be it in the basement of one's home or even a bedroom, from what we see these days, how can the AG maintain its effectiveness? Are there any concerns there?

Second, how can there be a lowering of costs for taxpayers who fund governmental organizations in this era when individuals can be situated at home? I'll start off with that question.

[Karen Hogan]

The remote working environment brings out a whole different set of complexities. There's the whole aspect of managing a remote workforce, which is very different from managing a workforce that you get to see every day. I think the tendency historically might have been to reward presenteeism versus delivery. It's a whole different aspect of how you manage people. I think that's a global issue across federal public service and across any organization as you move from a workforce in a building to a remote workforce. I think we also have to think about security and safeguarding information. That's another concern.

How do we maintain our effectiveness? Through the first round of our financial audits, we saw a huge change in how we gathered evidence and how entities could provide us with evidence. Now we're seeing even through our performance audits the quality of evidence and how we're getting it. There's a whole set of new challenges that we have to overcome together with the departments. How did they digitize? Can we then rely on it being an accurate digitization of a document that they might want to provide to us? I think it goes back to some training of individuals about new technologies, how to use them and how to work differently.

Do I think it will reduce costs? I think like any big change, there isn't a reduction of costs at the beginning. It's almost an investment is needed in order to get to a place where you can see the outcomes and see the benefits of being more effective and more efficient. I can assure you that all of our audits, even though it might take us a little longer, are following the same exacting standards we followed before, when we saw entities face to face. Even though we're seeing them through MS Teams or Zoom, you can definitely still rely on the quality of the audits we're providing to you.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Yes. I also think that in a traditional audit the comment was, “We have auditors on site this week.” Obviously, there will be new demands on organizations to have really...I don't want to say non-productive hours, but non-productive hours digitizing documents that traditionally auditors would have to come on site to retrieve or look at. I think those are issues that a lot of organizations are going to deal with.

Going forward, hopefully we'll get to some normality very soon, but with the environment we're in, my own personal view on career development is that new individuals who come into the AGO actually benefit from being amongst colleagues. When new people come into an environment, especially when they're starting their careers, they just can't get the camaraderie and mentorship while sitting at home. For organizations that think they can just cut off and do remote working, I would wager that once things get back to some normalcy, this will be reversed very quickly. You are seeing comments on that matter from organizations already these days.

[Karen Hogan]

If I could react a little to that, Madam Chair, I think flexibility is definitely needed. There may always be situations where an auditor needs to be on site, such as for an inventory count. It depends what we're counting, but sometimes you can't always do that in a digital way. There will be a need to be on site at times, but I think the days are long gone where the auditors are here for the next four and a half months. I think we have to work that through even with the entities we audit.

You raise an important thing about sense of belonging. I think that's where our young people are better with a digital world. Andrew and I have started a reverse mentor program that I wanted to share with you, so that some of our young recruits can tell us how they want to work better and be managed better. Hopefully, we'll learn some great insights that I can share with the committee at some point.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much, Mr. Sorbara and Ms. Hogan.

Thank you to our witnesses for joining us.

Colleagues, if everyone is satisfied that we have sufficiently studied the main estimates, I have two questions for you.

Are you ready for the question on the main estimates today?

I see thumbs up and nods.

OFFICE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL

Vote 1—Program expenditures..........$104,833,863

(Vote 1 agreed to on division)

Shall I report the vote on the main estimates to the House?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

On division.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much, members, for joining us today.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Madam Chair, I would like to ask my colleague Mr. Berthold a question.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Yes.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

I may have misunderstood the concept of division. I understood it to be when a committee member disagrees with the motion.

Is that your understanding as well?

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

As we have not had time to study the entire appropriations in depth, rather than going into every little detail, we prefer to adopt them on division.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

All right, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Berthold, I did ask if everyone was satisfied that we had sufficiently studied the main estimates. I was assured that we had.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

So we don't have to deal with the main estimates today. They don't have to be reported back to the House until May. If what I'm hearing from you is that you would like further study on the main estimates, we could definitely do that.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

We don't need more time. We don't have time in committee to do that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly Block]

We could do it on another day. We do have it scheduled for—

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Yes, but we don't need time for that.