About the Update on Past Audits
Purpose
This dashboard tracks the performance of selected government departments and agencies in several areas previously audited by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. The searchable tool includes performance measures and recommendations from audits conducted from 2014 to 2020. We decided which measures and recommendations to include in the dashboard on the basis of their continued relevance to parliamentarians and Canadians.
We reviewed the progress of departments and agencies in implementing our past audit recommendations. We also applied the same measures, when possible, to updated data received from the departments and agencies to quantitatively gauge their progress against past performance.
This dashboard provides an unbiased evaluation of progress with respect to specific measures and recommendations; its purpose is not to explore why progress was or was not made.
Scope and approach
This product is not an audit and does not express an audit opinion. To ensure that information reported through the dashboard is credible, we made inquiries with the management and internal audit function of each department and agency. We also obtained supporting evidence as needed.
In addition to the steps we followed to obtain updated performance results and report on the level of implementation of recommendations, we obtained the following from management:
- confirmation that all known information that has been requested, or that could affect the update, has been provided
- confirmation that the information to be reported is accurate
We did not look at the processes put in place (when applicable) to improve the results achieved by departments and agencies. We did not examine the reasons why performance results improved or failed to improve since the previous audit, or why recommendations were implemented or not implemented.
We made modifications to some measures to ensure that the results reported would be relevant to the government activity being carried out at the time of our review.
In some cases, a performance measure or recommendation may have been attributed to a department or agency for which the name or mandate has changed since the previous audit report.
Period covered by the update
The update covered the period from October 2014 to October 2022.
Date of the update
We concluded our work on the performance measures included in this update on 1 November 2022, in Ottawa, Canada.