The committee met at 8:05 a.m.

[P. Milobar in the chair.]

Action Plan Progress Assessments
on Auditor General Reports

P. Milobar (Chair): Okay. Good morning, everyone. I will call the meeting of the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts to order.

First off, we only have one item on the agenda officially today, and that’s the discussion of the action plan progress assessments. Being new to the committee, I recognize that we’re…. I tried to do some back-reading and realized there’s quite a bit of history here. There was a fair amount of subcommittee work that happened over the last year as well. I believe the last discussion on this was in November.

Perhaps we’ll just get started with Jennifer giving us a bit of an overview of the action plan assessments and the work that the committee did to date. Then we’ll open it up for discussion. I know the last time there were only about ten minutes left on the agenda to talk about it. We’ve got lots of time today. That doesn’t mean we have to take all two hours either.

I’ll turn it over to Jennifer.

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): Thank you, Chair.

Good morning, Members.

As the Chair noted, at the November 25 meeting, when this topic last was discussed, the committee expressed an interest in a further discussion about the action plan progress assessments. Of course, that’s the opportunity today. I’ll provide a brief overview of the action plan progress assessments, or APPAs, as they’re sometimes referred to, including the work that the committee and the subcommittee on agenda and procedure have undertaken in the last eight months or so.

As members will recall, each time the Office of the Auditor General releases an audit report, it comes before the committee for review. At that time, the audited organization provides an action plan outlining if, when and how the recommendations will be implemented. Then, on an annual basis, each audited organization is asked to submit to the committee an action plan progress assessment which provides an update on the progress made in implementing the recommendations.

The Office of the Auditor General receives these APPAs. For the 2021 APPAs, the Office of the Auditor General provided a status report on them. All of the 2021 APPAs and this status report are available in the committee’s meeting materials today. As members will recall, there were 37 2021 APPAs that were received by the committee.

The committee met in June of last year to discuss the 2021 APPAs alongside that status report. At that meeting, the Auditor General suggested the development of a streamlined cleanup process, particularly for audits prepared before 2020. He noted this process could include an assessment from his office of the APPAs that were reported as fully implemented and the preparation of one-page documents done by audited organizations. So the audited organizations could prepare one-page documents which could touch on, for example, the relevancy of any outstanding recommendations.

The committee asked the subcommittee on agenda and procedure to take a look at the APPAs and the APPA process and report back to the committee with recommendations. The subcommittee met later in June and developed a proposed process outline based on the discussion at the June 7 full committee meeting. So they took those ideas that were brought forward and developed a process outline.

The details of that proposal are set out in the subcommittee’s report to the committee, which was presented at the committee’s meeting in November. That subcommittee report that the full committee received on November 25 outlines that proposal. That’s also in the materials today.

In late October, the subcommittee received a report from the Office of the Auditor General that provided a risk assessment of the 14 2021 APPAs that were reported by the audited organizations as fully implemented. The Office of the Auditor General, in that report, recommended that the committee consider not requesting future APPAs for seven of those 14. With respect to the other seven, the Office of the Auditor General noted that there may be specific audit recommendations that required outstanding actions or that did not meet expectations.

[8:10 a.m.]

The OAG’s report on the 14 APPAs that were self-assessed as fully implemented are also included in today’s materials. Also in late October, through the office of the comptroller general, the subcommittee received additional information from audited organizations on APPAs that were more than three years old with outstanding recommendations. As most of you will recall, then the subcommittee reported back to the full committee. Again, that’s the November 25 meeting. Of course, the OAG and the OCG were present at that meeting, and there was that brief discussion.

The Auditor General suggested at that meeting that the OAG, the Office of the Auditor General, could look at an approach to the APPAs similar to that taken by the Nova Scotia Office of the Auditor General, including an annual report that provides a review-level assurance on recommendations that are reported as fully implemented. More information about the Nova Scotia approach is included in today’s meeting materials as well, at the end of the briefing note.

That concludes my overview as to where the committee began and where they are to date. I’ll turn the floor back to you, Chair.

P. Milobar (Chair): Okay, we’re kind of at that stage, it seems like…. Again, I recognize…. I think I’m our third Chair in 3½ years. Our side of the fence has rolled people through a little bit over the last couple of years. I recognize that, but we are getting to that point where I think we need to start figuring out how we want to deal with these APPAs, by the looks of things, and move forward.

I’m not sure if anyone who was on previously — Norm, you’re new — has any comments or discussion points you’d like to just kick it off with.

Anyone? This could be a quick meeting.

R. Glumac (Deputy Chair): I’ll just say the purpose of all this is that we want to put some structure behind this auditing process so that expectations are very clear and understood and that we have a feeling of confidence that the recommendations that are made are implemented.

Prior to this, there were some recommendations that were sitting around for years. There wasn’t really any finalization of that, or anything. So I think there’s a big role, in this committee, to try to formalize all of this now, with all the work that has been done. Just a bit of background on that.

M. Starchuk: From my perspective, it becomes a lit­tle…. It was so busy last year. It was all over the map. What is in progress? What is completed? It looks like my desk in my CO. It just kept on piling up. You couldn’t figure out where anything was.

Until the process is streamlined, where you can pluck it out…. When you try to do this electronically, it is a real pain. It is a real pain to try to figure out where everything is right now. For me, it would be nice to have, maybe, an executive summary of some sort that allows you to see where we are with all of those things, just from my organizational-skills point of view.

B. Banman: I kind of echo some of what Mike says. As I was sitting there, I was trying to recall the actual wording that most of the police boards use — here they would call it a page at a glance, or whatever it’s called — a simple picture as to where things are. It’s so you can focus in on: which ones do we really need to burrow into? There may be some organizational problems within that particular thing, where that particular project has got some kind of challenge and we want to focus as to why.

What the heck do they call that in the police board?

L. Hill: Dashboard.

B. Banman: Yes. Thank you. I knew it was in there somewhere, but I’ve only had two cups of coffee, so I’m still struggling.

[8:15 a.m.]

It’s so we can just be able to look at: what projects is government struggling to implement, and why? How can we learn from that, moving forward?

P. Milobar (Chair): Okay. I mean, it’s pretty obvious for me, reading the background, that everyone has been struggling with how to make things a little more efficient. We have the outstanding suggestion from the OAG to try the Nova Scotia model as well, but we never did, as a committee, get to a landing spot on whether to give that a shot or not.

N. Letnick: Being new — and I’m going to use that for as long as I can — when I looked at the APPA, to me it seemed pretty clear. Green, yellow, red — the ones that have been implemented, the ones that are not implemented.

I guess I’m struggling to find out what it is that we’re trying to achieve here. Are we trying to get a summary of the summary of the report — in other words, a summary of the APPAs? The only thing that’s missing from this, for me, is another colour which says, “Not on your life do we have any time or any plans to implement what the AG says,” because not always does the body agree with the AG on the recommendations.

That’d be nice to know as well — that the people who are responsible for implementing have decided they’re not going to because they don’t believe it’s right and that the AG was wrong, or whatever the reasons are.

Being new, I’d just like to know: what am I missing here, Rick, or Mr. Chair?

R. Glumac (Deputy Chair): The process of disagreement happens earlier. I think these ones are the ones that are agreed to.

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): Norm, the dashboard that you’re speaking of is something that’s created by our staff here to support the committee. The APPAs are self-assessments. They’re what the audited organization is saying they’ve completed or they’ve partially completed. We pull that into a dashboard just so that there’s a quick summary.

Now, there’s another piece. I think this is what Rick is going to. Sometimes, as noted in the OAG’s report on the 14 APPAs that were self-assessed as fully implemented, they noted, from their perspective…. They did a risk assessment, and they noted from that that seven of those APPAs, they felt, were not fully implemented or needed some more work. I think that’s maybe what Rick is referring to.

Interjection.

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): Oh, my apologies.

R. Glumac (Deputy Chair): What I meant was when the Auditor General makes recommendations, the organization will usually say, “Okay, we agree with all these recommendations,” but sometimes they might say they don’t. That process happens much earlier. I don’t think any of these reflect any disagreement. They’ve committed to doing all of these. Have they actually been done, is the question that we’re trying to determine.

N. Letnick: If they haven’t been done, maybe something has changed in the time between the time they accepted it and trying to implement it. They realized, maybe, that the risk isn’t high and the cost is high. or whatever. That would be good to know, for the AG and the organization, as well as us.

Jennifer, if staff is doing this already, summarizing the APPA, then why doesn’t staff just continue doing this? It looks really simple for us to see, at a glance, what’s going well and what’s not going well. Again, I don’t know what we’re missing here. This seems to be what you’re talking about.

P. Milobar (Chair): Yeah, I kind of half-wondered that myself. My sense — reading through it and in discussion with Jennifer on that — is that, as you’ve heard from other committee members, there’s a lot more to it, especially when you’re getting into 37. Some are being tracked year over year, so it starts to get very cumbersome in trying to figure out how to navigate and make sure that things are actually being even relevant anymore.

That’s why there’s still also…. We’re kind of bouncing over the two pieces here right now, but we’ll dial it in.

There’s also the decision we can make today around the AG saying that seven of the 14 are very low risk. Are we comfortable just saying that those ones are done and that we’re not going to keep worrying about those seven? That’s all tied together, right?

[8:20 a.m.]

I guess the big question in the immediate step is: is the committee comfortable taking the AG’s suggestion around trying the Nova Scotia model? We could put a timeline on it — to try it for a year to see if that works better or not — and have an automatic review mechanism for it. I was only thinking of that, recognizing that Chairs and committee members do change.

If we don’t have some sort of an automatic review, it just becomes how it’s always going to be moving forward, whether it works or not. Then we’ve just created another issue for the next committee to go back to the drawing board — that type of thing.

I guess that’s really what we kind of need to drill into today with the discussion. Having that more time for it today was to try to find out: are we comfortable trying to go with their suggestion around the Nova Scotia model? Do we want to bring back the Auditor General and the comptroller general to say, “Well, that’s not really what the committee wants, but this is what we would like to try to do,” or does the subcommittee just go back and kick it around for a bit longer? That’s kind of the direction we need to figure out here, moving forward.

B. Anderson: I would like to take the Auditor General’s suggestion and do the Nova Scotia model, but I like the idea of reviewing it after a year, once we’ve seen what that looks like. Was it helpful? Was it not? Did it just create more unnecessary work for staff, or not? I really like that suggestion, Chair.

D. Coulter: I was going to agree with my colleague. I think the subcommittee has already done quite a bit of work on this, as well as taking the Auditor General’s suggestions. I don’t think we need to send it back for them to kick around anymore. I think we can move forward on this if people are comfortable.

P. Milobar (Chair): Okay. Anyone else? It’s sounding like there’s starting to be a direction that way. Is there anyone contrary-minded to the suggestion?

Do you want a motion now, or do you want it at the end?

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): I don’t think a motion is required. What we can do is, perhaps, work with the Chair and Deputy Chair to draft some correspondence to the OAG, just advising them that the committee took a look at the suggestion and expressed some interest in seeing that.

R. Glumac (Deputy Chair): There are three motions listed here. Are we intending to pass those?

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): Those motions were included in the subcommittee’s report to the full committee on November 25. Those were the recommendations that the subcommittee made to the committee about how to move forward with the 2021 APPAs.

I will note for the committee that the process is such that unless the committee flags that they no longer feel they’re required to receive the APPA, they will continue receiving the APPA. What will happen for 2022, for example, would be following that process: the committee will receive the 37 from 2021, as well as any additional ones that are added on to the year. They will continue to receive that unless the committee flags that there are some that they don’t feel they need to see anymore.

Ron, do you want to jump in?

R. Wall: I think Rick mentioned the recommendations from the subcommittee report in November. As I think the Chair was mentioning, there is the idea of maybe dispensing with the seven for which the OAG has indicated that there’s a low risk. That’s the first motion in that package.

P. Milobar (Chair): Okay. So both Rick and I will follow up with the OAG around the Nova Scotia model, express what we’ve heard today, and see how we could start doing that. Then to Rick’s point, I guess, about the motions, the only one that’s somewhat relevant today, it sounds like, is whether or not we want to remove those seven and deem them to be done or not. I might as well throw that out there out there for discussion or a motion.

[8:25 a.m.]

D. Coulter: Chair, I move that the following seven action plan progress assessments, APPAs, received by the committee in 2021 be removed from future APPA requests because they reported that all audit recommendations were fully implemented and the Office of the Auditor General recommended that the committee consider removing them from the list of future requests: B.C. government’s internal directory account management, IDIR; B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch directly awarded contracts; the short-term illness and injury plan; Ministry of Citizens’ Services real estate asset sales management; Regional Transpor­tation Management Centre’s cybersecurity controls; contract for the family maintenance enforcement program; and the PRIME-BC system – a security audit.

Motion approved.

R. Glumac (Deputy Chair): In terms of the earlier discussion around a dashboard, the summary table provided by the Office of the Auditor General, if I understand it correctly, it’s reporting on the percentage, self-assessed, as implemented. That’s according to the government entity, right? That’s not whether the Office of the Auditor General agrees or not.

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): I’m going to ask Ron to jump in if I misspeak, but yes, that’s just a summary. At the time that they took a closer look, they did a risk assessment of the 14 that are self-assessed as fully implemented. For the other ones, yes, it’s that table that you’re referring to, with the percentage of recommendations. That’s based on the information that was provided by the audited organizations.

R. Glumac (Deputy Chair): Those 14 are on this table as well.

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): Yes.

R. Glumac (Deputy Chair): But there’s no information on whether the Auditor General agrees. Maybe some feedback would be that it could include that information on the one table, because it’s nice to see all that in one place.

P. Milobar (Chair): Okay, we’ll see what we can do with that.

Anything else in terms of next steps? We do have several dates that have been agreed upon, I believe, through everyone’s LAs, in terms of trying to get them in while we’re actually here, physically, so we don’t have to come back and forth.

R. Glumac (Deputy Chair): The purpose of all of these APPAs, and everything, is to follow up on the recommendations that were made by the Auditor General. As you can see, there are some that are older than 2014 and are still not fully implemented. I think the purpose of all this is for the committee to get a sense of what ministries or organizations we should invite back and ask questions to. The information that’s presented to us should help us answer that question. That should be part of the process.

I think that’s part of the Nova Scotia process, correct?

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): I’m not sure about the Nova Scotia process, in terms of asking audited organizations to reappear, but it is certainly something that this committee could consider if there are outstanding recommendations that are self-assessed or whatever as not completed — or as completed, regardless. It’s absolutely within the hands of the committee to decide that they want to ask an audited organization to come back to speak to any of the recommendations that members may have questions about.

P. Milobar (Chair): Anything else, Ron, or does that pretty much sum it up?

R. Wall: The B.C. office has, in the past, identified some audits where there are, in their view, significant gaps — which they can handle in two ways, at least. One was that they could do a re-audit of the audit. The other was to suggest to the committee that they invite the organization and the OAG to come back and talk about why the gaps are there and what should be done about that.

J. Arril (Clerk of Committees): I’ll just add, too, that the committee can also follow up, in writing, with audited organizations. If there are specific questions or information, that could also be a first step that the committee may wish to consider.

P. Milobar (Chair): Okay. Anything else?

I don’t think we need to go in camera, it sounds like.

All right. Well, I guess a motion to adjourn.

We’re adjourned. Thanks, folks.

The committee adjourned at 8:30 a.m.