Plaudits for audits
Each spring and fall, a volley of bad news lands like mortars in federal government trenches. The twice-yearly salvo from the auditor general of Canada typically consists of a half-dozen or so audits exposing waste and incompetence. Previous audits, such as Sheila Fraser’s on the Liberal sponsorship scandal, rocked government to its core. This year’s fusillades promise to be especially incendiary, with an audit on the CBC and another on vaccine expenditures scheduled for release.
For journalists, these one-day affairs are stress city. An early-morning lockup, flipping through hundreds of pages on wildly diverse topics, news conference with the auditor general, writing, editing, then rewriting with reaction, then more reaction from Question Period, all the while fretting that competitors spotted some scandal you missed. It’s a killer workday.
The intense sessions also beg the question: shouldn’t reporters dig year-round for stories of waste rather than rely on these semi-annual handouts from the auditor general? Of course they should, though the deck is ever more stacked against them, to wit, dysfunctional access-to-information, feeble whistleblower protection, zipper-lipped bureaucrats. The auditor general, on the other hand, gets the information she demands. She is Parliament’s agent, not the government’s.
A widely neglected resource that can fill the media void are the internal audits conducted each year by federal institutions themselves. Every department or agency with an annual budget of at least $300 million must regularly audit its programs and spending. Treasury Board requires professional standards and independence for these auditors, to avert any self-serving shenanigans. And the internal audits must be made public.
Of course, government officials know these reports can be kryptonite and work diligently to bury them. One tactic is to delay public posting for months, on phoney administrative grounds. (To get around this dodge, I used to ask for draft versions under access-to-information but the Harper government closed that loophole in 2006 by protecting drafts from early release.) There’s also no central repository for internal audits, forcing a department-by-department website search, which can be maddening because of “Error 404” results and screwy consolidations under Canada.ca.
Web searches should use the phrase “internal audit and evaluation” matched with the name of a department. Taking Finance Canada as an example, such a search puts this page at or near the top. Here you’ll find links to completed audits, as well as a list of planned audits to watch for. Another such search for Global Affairs Canada gives this page, though the list of planned audits is missing.
A word about “evaluations,” which also pop up on these searches. Evaluations are poor cousins to audits, conducted under less stringent standards and focused on policy rather than spending. Treasury Board puts it like this: evaluations ask “are we doing the right things?” while audits ask “are we doing things right?” Evaluations are also publicly posted (see the Finance Canada link above, for example, or this one for Global Affairs Canada) and can be newsy, though less reliably than internal audits in my experience.
Digging for stories in these lonely mine shafts takes patience and a tolerance for bureaucratese. Getting comment and reaction can also be a challenge. Unlike auditor general reports, which trigger political pile-ons, almost no one will have read the internal audit you found. Government apologists will underscore the stale dates of posted internal audits, despite having had a hand in delaying their release. They’ll also assert that the problems got fixed long ago, so nothing to see here, move along. Still, reporters’ enterprise and tenacity will be rewarded with scoops – and will show the world they’re not just waiting around for those one-day wonders from the auditor general.
Feb. 6, 2022
