Members of Parliament on the House of Commons Government Operations and Estimates Committee want Parliament to vote to approve spending based on the actual programs the money will go to. Right now, votes are organized around vague categories like operating, capital, and grants and contributions.
“If we could move on that front I think that could be a major, or even exciting, achievement,” said Liberal John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.) at committee.
The change is meant to make spending easier to understand and therefore easier to hold the government to account on, say MPs on the committee. Their report on the estimates process was tabled in the House in June and included 15 recommendations.
In the 10 months since, Treasury Board Secretariat has been working on a mock-up of what the estimates would look like if the spending requests, which come out four times a year, were organized by program activity.
“I share my enthusiasm with Mr. McCallum about this shift to the program activity view. I think it’s more meaningful and will lead to better scrutiny of the supply process,” said Conservative MP Bernard Trottier (Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Ont.) at committee.
The department estimates it would cost $45-million, to invest in items like new accounting technology, and take five years to implement.
“I’ve also instructed my officials to do additional work on the costing of this potential change to determine if there are ways to further drive down the costs,” explained Treasury Board President Tony Clement (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.) in an appearance before the committee April 24.
When pressured about whether Treasury Board Secretariat would actually implement the new system, Mr. Clement said the department needed more time to look at bringing down the cost of the project.
“Forty-five-million is a lot of money,” he said.
“Since departments purchase IT all the time, are there ways that we could transition and piggy-back onto their IT purchases over time that would reduce the incremental cost of this project,” he added.
He said he didn’t have a timeline as to how long it would take to investigate further options, or whether piggybacking on other IT projects would take longer.
Mr. McCallum said it would depend on how much time the government needed.
“It depends if were talking weeks or months or years or decades to come. Because this is, I think, the most important priority in our report, and we’d like to see it happen sooner rather than later. If these tweaks of the system could be done in a few months that might be okay, but if you’re talking another decade, that’s not okay,” he said.
Treasury Board Secretary Yaprak Baltacioglu told the committee that there are currently about 130 organizations detailed in the estimates. Together, they have about 1,900 strategic outcomes—or overarching goals like poverty elimination or providing advice to the Prime Minister—and about 3,000 program activities, which are the things they do to reach those goals.
The question is, how much detail should be included in the estimates without “inundating Parliament,” said Bill Matthews, assistant secretary of expenditure management at Treasury Board Secretariat.
“The average department, bigger ones especially, you’re probably looking at about 10 to 12 programs,” he added.
The Treasury Board Secretariat is expected to provide an in camera brief to the committee on how the change might work.
Mr. Clement said “significant work” has been done on a number of the committee’s other recommendations.
Last week he launched a new online database that allows the public to see how much money a department can spend, and how much it spent in past years.
“This is a new searchable online database that for the first time ever will consolidate all information on government spending in one place,” said Mr. Clement.
It’s searchable by item, like telecommunications or transportation or by program. It also makes it easier to compare departments’ spending on similar items. The House Government Operations Committee had recommended the creation of such a database in its report.
Over the next two years the government will expand the database’s features and the information available for past years. In 2014, it will start updating it will quarterly spending information.
“We didn’t think it was wise to wait until it was all singing and it was all dancing before we released something,” said Mr. Matthews of the rollout.
Based on other recommendations from the committee, the annual reports on plans and priorities tabled by departments each spring to explain their work for the year now include information on how much money they spent in the past three years, and how much they intend to spend in the next three years. They also include explanations of any major issues affecting spending.
The current main estimates, tabled in March have some reforms, including new graphs summarizing spending as well as information on 2011-2012 actual expenditures and the 2012-2013 estimates.
The next round of spending estimates, expected later this spring, will highlight new programs and link back to their announcement in the 2013 budget.
“It’s very encouraging. It’s a series of a small changes which collectively you could call it a transformation,” said Mr. Trottier.
“Yes our report recommended a lot of changes which we are grateful the government is doing, but there are a number of equally important recommendations,” that haven’t been implemented, said NDP MP Linda Duncan (Edmonton Strathcona, Alta.)
She cited the recommendation that the Parliamentary Budget Office be given more resources to help MPs analyze the estimates. The PBO has an annual budget of $2.8-million and a staff of 15.
“We have to catch up, and we are starting to catch up, with that complexity to allow individual human beings…to actually understand what is being done. I do think that [the database] will be very helpful. I think it answers many of the concerns you have with respect to access to budgetary information,” responded Mr. Clement
Mr. McCallum said while the database is good, “the most exciting thing” is the possible change to program activity.
“I think that would kind of revolutionize the way we see things,” he said.
The main estimates for 2013-2014 list $252.5-billion in voted and statutory funding. The government will ask for Parliament’s permission to spend further funding in three rounds of supplementary estimates over the next 11 months.
Starting in 2012, the government has been enacting plans to cut $4.9-billion from department’s budgets in effort to save money and balance the budget by 2015-2016.
Mr. Clement said these cuts would start to be apparent in this year’s estimates, but opposition parties say it’s still unclear which programs would be affected by the cuts.
A major point of contention is the cost of internal services, which include items like human resources, technology, and accounting.
The government has said most of the cuts would fall on departments’ back office rather than frontline services.
The Parliamentary Budget Office looked at spending between April and September 2012 and found departments’ spending on internal services was actually up by eight per cent, according to a report release in January.
Mr. Clement has disputed the finding.
“There’s a difference between internal services as back office services,” said Mr. Matthews, who said that on top of internal services costs, which every department calculates differently, some back office costs would be embedded into the budgets of every government program.
“It would not be captured by internal service,” he said.
“If the savings are not in internal services, how are we, as Parliamentarians, supposed to track the reduction in spending?” asked NDP Treasury Board critic Matthew Ravignat (Pontiac, Que.).
Mr. Matthews said the best indication would be in the operations vote of a department’s estimates.
Mr. Clement said he’s “very pleased” with the progress the government has made with the database and on reforming the estimates.
“This is not going to create world peace in our time, but I think it will be a substantive improvement over the status quo,” he said.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: Jessica Bruno
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