There are no new recommendations to the Department of Energy, the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission (APMC), the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) or the Post-Closure Stewardship Fund in this report. The department has one outstanding recommendation, the APMC has four outstanding recommendations, and the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) has 13 outstanding recommendations.
The department has implemented our recommendation to improve user access controls—see page 59.
We issued unqualified independent auditor’s reports on the 2018-2019 financial statements for the APMC, AUC, and the Post-Closure Stewardship Fund.
The APMC has implemented our recommendations related to the processing agreement cash flow model—see page 60.
We issued a qualified auditor’s report on AER based on our conclusion that it did not appropriately reflect financial transactions related to an entity it created (ICORE NFP) in its financial statements. Our qualification is discussed further in the next section.
In our Alberta Energy Regulator: An Examination of the International Centre of Regulatory Excellence (ICORE) report, issued in October 2019, we made four recommendations on AER’s activities related to various iterations of the International Centre of Regulatory Excellence (ICORE), predominantly ICORE Not-For-Profit (ICORE NFP).
In our Systems to Ensure Sufficient Financial Security for Land Disturbances from Mining Followup, we report that one outstanding recommendation to AER to improve mine financial security program monitoring has been implemented.
As part of our financial statement audit of AER for the year ended March 31, 2019, we found instances of internal control weaknesses and legislative non-compliance. As a result, we issued three new recommendations to AER in this report—see page 53.