Family services audit data 'unusable'
New tool was meant to address damning auditor general's report
Kirsten Fenn
Northern News Services
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
The Department of Health and Social Services is heading back to the drawing board after a new tool it used for auditing child and family services in 2015 failed to produce any usable data.
Former director of child and family services Andy Langford, left, Health and Social Services Minister Glen Abernethy and deputy minister of Health and Social Services Debbie DeLancey deliver a presentation on child and family services to the standing committee on social development on Thursday at the legislative assembly. - Kirsten Fenn/NNSL photo |
"In many respects, it's best to view the year's audits as a trial run," said Health and Social Services Minister Glen Abernethy at the Standing Committee on Social Development Thursday at the legislative assembly. "We've learned from the experiences that we've had."
The department created the auditing tool in response to a damning 2014 auditor general's report on the state of child and family services in the NWT. It's an electronic database that tracks compliance with legislative requirements under the Child and Family Services Act and compliance with policies and practice standards, according to former director of child and family services, Andy Langford.
Once the tool was developed, the department established audit teams to collect information from regional authorities across the territory.
But during that data collection, the electronic database "broke," according to Langford.
"First of all, not all of our offices had the (auditing) program on their computers," Langford said. "I don't understand exactly what happened, except that in some regions the computers would work and in other regions they were less reliable."
Langford said differences in the auditing teams' familiarity with the program may have played a role in the problem as well. When Yellowknife Centre MLA Julie Green asked whether there were any audit results for 2015-16, Langford replied there are "none that I would consider sufficiently reliable to act upon."
"We now have a new audit tool and this one has been written in Excel," Langford said. "Much more user-friendly."
He said the department is proposing to conduct a "retrospective" audit of child and family services data from the 2016-17 year sometime between April and June.
Green said she was concerned that MLAs would not be able to see the 2015 audit results, but Abernethy insisted the data would not be useful.
Not only were the audits being tested for the first time, but they were done at a time when service standards were evolving, Abernethy said.
"The tool may have been slightly tweaked from one region to the next, which ultimately may have led to the demise of the tool we had in place," he said.
Audit teams were also going through a learning curve, he said.
It would require a team of staff to go through the data and make it user-friendly, he said, adding he's not willing to send staff back through "reams" of paper.
"That's a lot of time," said Abernethy. Although the minister said he is confident the department is collecting the data it needs, no audit results are expected to be made public. He did, however, agree to share the information and future audits with the standing committee.
Health and Social Services spokesperson David Maguire said the database was done "in-house and as a result did not result in additional cost."
