Taxpayers haven’t been getting the best deal when it comes to delivery of child and spousal support payments, the Office of the Auditor General has found.
Auditor General Carol Bellringer said the Ministry of Justice did not follow procurement strategies that would encourage competition, in awarding the contract for delivery of the Family Maintenance Enforcement Program.
The program collects and issues payments for child and spousal support. Last year, it issued $210 million in support payments.
“The ministry can’t demonstrate that it has achieved best value for taxpayer money,” Bellringer said Thursday.
She has asked the Ministry of Finance to internally identify whether the same might be true for other programs and called for more ministry oversight of multi-year contracts.
“Although this audit only focused on one contract, the lessons learned may have broader application,” Bellringer said.
The audit focused on the ministry’s management of the contract, not the quality of service.
The same private contractor has delivered the Family Maintenance Enforcement Program for 29 years.
A former government employee won the first contract for the program in 1988. At the time, the government was encouraging employees to form private companies and bid on contracts for the services they provided as government employees.
When the ministry last advertised the contract in 2006, the service provider was the only one to bid on it. While the ministry followed required policy, Bellringer said it didn’t do enough to level the playing field for competitors.
“The ministry did not achieve competition, which is a key principle of fair and open procurement,” she said.
She also didn’t see evidence that ministry executives received complete information about financial, legal and program delivery costs.
The contract hasn’t changed in 10 years and the contractor has regularly requested and received more funding because of increasing program costs. This should have triggered more ministry oversight, the report said.
The Ministry of Justice has paid the contractor $160 million over the past 10 years.
Attorney General David Eby said he was surprised to learn a major program had gone out to tender in a way that didn’t encourage multiple bids.
He said he is initiating a review of other contracts under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, as well as those under the B.C. Lottery Corp. and Liquor Control and Licensing Branch.
“I can see how this happens. You have a contract that’s been in place for a long time with a service provider who, for all intents and purposes, appears to be just another office of government,” Eby said.
“But even if it’s easy to make a mistake, we shouldn’t be making them.”
