A federal House of Commons government operations committee heard that federal managers set easy performance targets that they often fail to meet.
Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux testified before the committee on March 20, stating that government department targets “tend to be too easy,” in response to a question from B.C. Liberal MP Parm Bains.
“I speak of my own experience having been in the public service for more than two decades. Generally speaking, targets are set so that they seem to be reasonably ambitious, but they are always deemed to be attainable, barring unforeseen events,” Giroux told the committee.
Annual targets are set by executives in Departmental Results reports, which are then tabled in Parliament, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
In earlier testimony, before the Senate national finance committee on Feb. 7, Giroux explained his role to the Senate committee as providing “independent, non-partisan analysis to assist parliamentarians in fulfilling their constitutional role of holding the government to account.”
Giroux, a former assistant commissioner with the Canada Revenue Agency, suggested government reports inflated achievements and were often incomplete or late.
Giroux also said reports were often “surprising” given that “close to half” either do not meet their targets or have no target date set.
In his February Senate appearance, Giroux said: “I’d be curious to see in the next Departmental Results report what Passport Canada will claim was their achievement. I wouldn’t be surprised if they claim some sort of success despite the disaster we’ve seen the last couple of months. There is clear, clear room for enhanced leadership.”
Giroux indicated that the targets set in Departmental Results reports are determined “in large part by the public servants responsible for delivering the programs themselves: assistant deputy ministers, approved by deputy ministers, approved by ministers,” he said.
“But in my experience ministers are not very well equipped to challenge their own officials. We end up in a situation where it is public servants responsible for delivering programs that set their own targets and they usually set the bar not too high so it doesn’t look too easy, but neither too low so it’s fairly easy to achieve most of the time,” Giroux told the committee. “Yet by their own assessment they fail to deliver on many of these.”
The budget officer told the committee, “There is a system that is broken.” He said the targets are not ambitious enough to make a “meaningful difference.”
“The government will ‘invest’ or will spend that many millions to do this and that,” said Giroux. “Okay, but what will be the result?”
“I can help you hold the government to account, but I cannot do this just by myself. There has to be a willingness to receive that information and act on it,” said the budget officer.
