Federal auditor general says her office needs extra $31M to fulfil its government watchdog mandate
OTTAWA — Canada’s auditor general says her office needs at least $31 million in additional funding to fulfil its watchdog mandate, more than twice the amount requested by her predecessor three years ago.
“The money is absolutely necessary in order to deliver our mandate the way we’d like to. As of now, we are focused on auditing the government’s response to the pandemic as well as its infrastructure plan, but the government is still doing a lot of other work and spending and purchases elsewhere,” Auditor General Karen Hogan told members of the federal public accounts committee Thursday.
“So we need the money to be able to modernize our office as well as expand the list of subjects we could audit.”
Hogan told MPs her office sent an official notice to the government in July requesting $25 million in permanent funding be added to its roughly $88-million budget.
But that amount doesn’t include the cost of the benefits and accommodation for all the new employees her office hopes to hire with the extra funds. She estimated those extra costs to total just over $6 million.
Hogan told parliamentarians that major audits expected to be published in the upcoming months would be delayed, such as the audit on the Liberals’ infrastructure plan as well as the government’s response to the pandemic.
The delays are due both to the lack of funding as well as the added complexity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Delivery of most non-COVID-19-related audits is also being affected, she added.
“When it comes now to the work that we’re doing on the COVID response, I think the biggest impact is capacity within the departments and our office,” Hogan explained.
“We’re seeing that it’s taking us a lot longer to deliver audits, mostly motivated by the desire to find that right balance with departments as they provide the much needed assistance to Canadians and try to help us deliver on our mandate,” she said, adding that the biggest slowdowns were with Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
This is far from the first time an auditor general pleads with parliamentarians for more money, though Hogan’s request is significantly higher than her predecessors’.
In 2017, then-Auditor General Michael Ferguson requested an additional $10.8 million, arguing that it was necessary to accommodate the increased workload imposed by the Trudeau government, such as auditing a plethora of new public agencies and projects.
The government gave Ferguson’s office the increase in 2018, but it was not repeated in 2019 or 2020.
Since then, MPs on the public accounts committee calculate that Ferguson and his successors have requested an increase in funding no fewer than 15 times.
Because so much time has past since Ferguson’s original budget ask, Hogan said her office now needs more than twice that amount to be able to hire a sufficient number of new auditors, bring the office’s technology up to speed and modernize how the office communicates its work with Canadians.
“With the passing of time, there is obviously a need to increase the request. For years, we did not invest in our IT systems and, when it comes to technology, we don’t just have a fixed capability gap. As time passes, the gap grows and it becomes increasingly expensive to modernize our systems,” Hogan explained.
This time, Hogan said she’s quite optimistic that her office will get the permanent funding it’s requesting.
“The conversations I’m having with senior government officials are very encouraging. We have received many questions that we answered. That back-and-forth is what is inspiring confidence in me, and leads me to believe that they have heard us and they are open to our request,” the auditor general said.
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