Addicted to external consultants at $1,090 per day, the Canada Border Services Agency has kept no documentation on the awarding of a contract without a call for tenders to the entrepreneurs who have enriched themselves the most with the development of ArriveCAN during the pandemic.
“We found that there was no documentation on file regarding the initial discussions and interactions between the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and GC Strategies,” writes Auditor General Karen Hogan in a much-anticipated report published Monday.
No one in the government was able to tell him who had made the decision to retain the firm GC Strategies, a company which came first among the subcontractors having made the greatest fortune with the ArriveCAN project, with a total of $19.1 million.
Despite her investigation, Karen Hogan has not been able to know with certainty how much the ArriveCAN application cost, but she estimates the bill at $59.5 million.
ArriveCAN is an application developed in 2020 and became temporarily mandatory during the global COVID-19 pandemic, becoming one of the emblems of border restrictions during this crisis.
A subcontractor too close
The CBSA allegedly provided answers on the awarding of contracts which did not at all convince the Agent of Parliament, according to whom its explanations “were not supported by convincing elements”. It notes numerous shortcomings which have resulted in a significant waste of public funds.
In particular, the Auditor General notes that after obtaining a first contract in these circumstances which were, to say the least, nebulous, GC Strategies subsequently participated in the development of the requirements for calls for tenders for the ArriveCAN project. Contracts without calls for tenders were also awarded to the firms 49 Solutions and KPMG without documentation.
Another department, Public Services and Procurement Canada, had even advised the CBSA to consider other suppliers, but the latter still decided not to launch a competitive process, in defiance of the basic rules of good management.
The Auditor General confirms that CBSA officials responsible for the ArriveCAN project were invited by suppliers to dinners and other activities. The federal government is working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in its investigation into these allegations.
“The existing relationships between suppliers and [des responsables du gouvernement] as well as the lack of documentation indicating that Agency staff had declared invitations to dinners or other activities created a significant risk or perception of conflict of interest with respect to decisions regarding supply,” writes Mme Horgan, who is not delving into this element of the audit so as not to duplicate the work of the current investigation.
Financial fiasco
Following the advice of its contractors, the government drafted tenders for ArriveCAN with eligibility criteria that were “very restrictive, which likely prevented competition.”
The duty notably reported that a call for tenders for this project had ignored the federal bilingualism standard, by requiring in its call for tenders to be able to “communicate in English both orally and in writing, without help, and making few mistakes.
The CBSA also relied heavily, and sometimes unnecessarily, on the expertise of external companies whose average daily cost for an employee is $1,090, much more than an equivalent position in the Government of Canada, estimated at $675.
All this leads the Auditor General to say that those responsible for this major IT project had little regard for “optimization of resources”. The Canada Border Services Agency accepted each of the report’s 10 recommendations.
Generally speaking, the government had not properly divided responsibilities between the CBSA and public health. The ArriveCAN application had not been tested properly, and its users suffered from an avalanche of updates, numbering 177 between April 2020 and October 2022. ArriveCAN is no longer mandatory upon arrival in the country.