Internal Audit and Evaluation Documents

Parks Canada - Parks Canada Performance, Evaluation and Audit 2006 - 2009 Plan

Report tabled and approved by the Audit Committee and the Evaluation Committee

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Appendices

1. Assumptions in the Calculation Of Audit and Evaluation Capacity
2. Audit and Evaluation Universes
3. Scoring Procedure
4. Results of Ratings of Elements of the Universes

1. Assumptions in the Calculation Of Audit and Evaluation Capacity

1.  

   Hours Available for Work Per FTE	Hours Available
   52 week/year * 5day week *7.5 hour/days	1950.0
   Average days holiday (20 days)	-150.0
   Average days sick (5 days)	- 37.5
   Average days training (5 days)	- 37.5
   Total Work Time Available	1725.0

   
   
   
2. Hours Available for Audit and Evaluation Work: On average approximately 30% or 525 hours of a typical auditor or evaluators available time per year is allocated to unit administration, including planning, meetings, internal systems, support to the audit and evaluation committees and general down time), leaving 1200 hours available for all types of audit and evaluation work. The Director's time for audit and evaluation work is estimated at 40% of a normal FTE or 575 hours divided equally between internal audit and evaluation.
   
   
3. Types of Audit and Evaluation Work: Available work hours are allocated to the following tasks:
   
   OCG or TBS Directed Audit and Evaluation Requirements
   • The Comptroller General requires up to 20% of internal audit resources be available to participate in government wide horizontal audits each year. These audits are based on government-wide risk analysis and may not be risk-based audit priorities for the Agency.
   • Draft TBS Evaluation Policy also proposes creating a Government-Wide Evaluation Plan that could dictate the scope and timing of Agency evaluation work.
   • This category does not include audit or evaluation work required as part of TB submissions or RMAF/RBAF commitments.
     
     
   Follow-up on Implementation of Management Responses
   • Agency Internal Audit and Evaluation Charters mandate follow-up on implementation of management responses to reports.
   • Follow-up takes the form of obtaining management representations of their implementation of management responses, six months to a year after the approval of an audit or evaluation report. Actual follow-up internal audits or evaluations are treated as risk-based project work.
     
     
   Special Requests
   • Periodic special requests by management outside the approved audit and evaluation plan are typical. Pervious examples include audits related to potential fraud or wrongdoing or extensive work carried out on quantitative risk assessment associated with warden law enforcement duties.
     
     
   Consulting/Advice/Coordination
   • Consulting and providing advice related to audit, evaluation, controls or performance measurement is a normal part of the activities of the OIAE. Frequently, the OIAE has also taken a lead role in coordinating the work related to Auditor General performance audits and follow-ups.
     
     
4. O&M Dollars Available for Contracting: Additional capacity can be purchased from contracted professionals based on available O&M budgets. An average per diem of $1,200 per day or $160 per hour is used for this calculation. For 2008-2009, O&M budgets for professional services are $156.5K for Internal Audit and $243K for evaluation (see Table 8 below, amounts are rounded to nearest thousand).
   
   
5. The resource consumption of the average audit and evaluation project: The average number of hours consumed by an audit or an evaluation project is affected by many factors, including its scope and complexity as well as the skills of the personnel performing the work. Based on a review of prior experience with contracted projects and estimates of internal staff time devoted to projects as well as the expectation that future evaluation projects will need to be more complex given the draft policy directions, typical values of 1,200 hours per internal audit project and 2,200 hours per evaluation project were identified.
   
   A significant exception to this general project average is Parks Canada's cycle of standardized financial and administrative audits where each audit involves from 250 to 450 hours depending on whether new areas are being audited necessitating development of new audit programs. Therefore, between 3 and 6 of these audits are equivalent to one typical internal audit as defined above.

Table 8: 2008-2009 Capacity For Internal Audit and Evaluation

2. Audit and Evaluation Universes

Elements in the table presented in the order on the template used by raters (i.e., order in MAF 5 assessment), some elements of the original TBS MAF universe not included or modifed. The table also links the elments to elements in the 2007 universe although the correspondence is not always exact. In addition, we have linked our MAF universe elements to the draft list of core management controls produced by TBS in November 2007.

Table 9: Comparison of 2008 and 2007 MAF Universe Elements and Links to Draft Core Management Controls

Table 10: Comparison of 2008 and 2007 PAA Universe Elements

3. Scoring Procedure

The rating of each element in the universes was determined as follows. Raw scores from 1 to 4 for each of the four questions for each element were recoded to a scale of –2 to +2 (i.e., 1=-2 to 4=+2). The total score of respondents to each question (e.g., is the framework for the element suitability designed) was calculated and then divided by the average number of respondents for the four questions for the element to create the average score per respondent for the question/element combination. These scores were summed across the four questions for each element and divided by four to create the average score per respondent for the element (e.g., the average score across suitability designed, consistently applied, effective, and monitored and improved for values based leadership).

The ratings determined in this way reflect the views and experiences of the responding managers and may differ if more or different groups of managers had responded. The scores are averages and do not reflect the degree of variability within and between groups of respondents.

4. Results of Ratings of Elements of the Universes

Table 11: Comparison of MAF 2007 and 2008 Ratings

Table 12: Results of 2008 MAF Assessement

Table 13: Comparison of PAA 2007 and 2008 Ratings

Table 14: Result of 2008 PAA Assessment

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