Auditor general finds 'room for improvement' in government departments

Canada's auditor general Michael Ferguson is feeling frustrated.

After shining the light on systemic deficiencies in data collection, analysis and information sharing across a multitude of government departments, Michael Ferguson says it's a trend that has stood out over the course of several audits conducted during his nearly five years in the role.

"It's just happening too often," he tells Chris Hall on The House.

"Whether it's not paying attention to the quality of data, whether it's the fact that they might make some changes to process after we make some recommendations but are not affecting results, or whether it's the number of times we just keep finding the departments are not living up to the standards they've set for themselves."

Ferguson issued his 2016 spring report this week, unearthing issues from inadequate efforts by Citizenship and Immigration to detect and prevent citizenship fraud, to a lack of a clearly defined approach for monitoring medicinal marijuana use by veterans.

What do his findings reveal?

Plenty of room for improvement, says Ferguson — and that's regardless of which party is in power. 

"There is a lot of room for government to improve on the delivery of services [by government]," he says.

Ferguson points to a 2009 audit of the immigration and refugee board, which found that 25 per cent of board positions were vacant, and that there was a significant backlog of appeals. 

Though the department acted on the recommendations issued by the auditor general, a following audit in 2015 found that the same number of vacancies remained — and that the time to process appeals had actually increased.

"That's the really discouraging thing, when we make recommendations and the departments can demonstrate that they have done something about it, but we come back in and find the results aren't really any different," he says.

"That's indicating that sometimes there's too much emphasis on changing or adding to process, rather than making sure that the process is going to affect results."