Summary
Clean drinking water, safe food, healthy forests, and health care: all important programs that the Alberta government regulates. Regulation involves setting standards, monitoring and enforcing compliance with the standards, and measuring results. The Alberta government works with other parties to deliver many programs and services locally—a decentralized approach. However, the government still regulates these areas. Volume 1 reports our findings of these four major systems audits.
Volume 2 has the findings and recommendations based on our cross-ministry and ministry audit work.
Objective and Scope
In volume 1, we examine the government’s programs for drinking water, food safety, reforestation, and regional health authority funding. In our cross-ministry work, we examined:
- Government of Alberta and Ministry Annual Reports
- Seniors Care and Programs
- Sustainable Resource and Environmental Management (SREM)
In volume 2, we report our audit of the financial statements of the government ministries and the results of applying specified auditing procedures to ministry performance measures.
Conclusion
This Annual Report contains 59 recommendations. In our audit work on the four programs (volume 1), we identified two key themes that are the focus of our recommendations:
- Standards exist—but government needs to better monitor and enforce compliance
- Government needs the right information to assess if programs are effective
In volume 2, we have key recommendations in the following areas:
- Information Technology project management
- Information systems’ controls
- Monitoring of apprenticeship program
- Farm Fuel Benefit program eligibility
- School board budgeting
- Assurance on well and production data and royalty revenue adjustments
- Health care cost