What to Expect—An Auditee’s Guide to the Performance Audit Process
5. After the audit
To understand past performance and to identify possible areas for improvement, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (OAG) believes that obtaining feedback from audited entities is important.
The OAG conducts post-audit surveys on various aspects of the audit experience after reports of the Auditor General or the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development have been tabled in the House of Commons.
The deputy head of the entity receives the survey and is expected to respond in a timely manner. A summary of the results is reported to Parliament in the OAG’s performance report.
The Auditor General or the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development and other OAG officials often appear before House of Commons and Senate committees to answer questions about reports after they are tabled.
The Auditor General most frequently appears before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts, which has a specific mandate to review and report on all of the Auditor General’s reports, as well as on the OAG’s reports on plans and priorities, and annual performance reports. Other parliamentary committees also hold hearings on matters raised in the Auditor General’s reports.
The Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development is usually called before the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development to answer questions about reports after they are tabled, and may also appear before other parliamentary committees.
Departmental and other entity representatives are also present at hearings.
The Standing Committee on Public Accounts has adopted the following motion:
That any organization that has been subject to a performance audit or a special examination by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, provides a detailed action plan to address the audit recommendations which have been agreed to—including specific actions, timelines for their completion and responsible individuals—to the Public Accounts Committee and the Office of the Auditor General of Canada within six months of the audit being tabled in the House of Commons; and,
- That organizations that are invited to appear before the Public Accounts Committee to discuss the findings of an audit should, when feasible, provide an action plan to the Committee prior to the hearing; and
- That action plans and progress reports received by the Committee be published on the Committee’s website.
This action plan should include specific actions and timelines for addressing recommendations and specify the individuals responsible for addressing them. Departments and agencies invited to appear before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts to discuss the audit findings should provide the plan to the Committee prior to the hearing and to the OAG.
To monitor progress on recommendations between audits, the OAG uses the monitoring process that exists within federal entities by accessing their monitoring records from time to time as required.
The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat policy requires that chief audit executives routinely report to the departmental audit committee on whether the management’s action plans have been implemented. These monitoring records are expected to be in place so that auditors can review them as required.
The OAG conducts follow-up audits of specific audit recommendations and issues of concern raised in past audit reports that continue to pose a significant risk or continue to be of interest to Parliament. The OAG completes these audits in the same manner as other performance audits, following professional auditing standards.
The audit team may identify issues that are less important than those included in the report tabled in the House of Commons, or that fall outside the audit scope but are of interest to the audited entity. The team communicates these issues to the entity’s deputy head or the head of its internal audit function, as appropriate, through a
- presentation,
- verbal communication, or
- formal management letter.
If a management letter is issued, the OAG may request a written response to the issues raised in it, including any proposed actions to be taken, together with a target completion date.
The OAG may also choose to follow up on these issues at a later date.