Audit of capital assets management: chapter 5

4. Conclusion

Overall, EC’s capital assets are managed in such a way that supports the delivery of the department’s strategic outcomes and objectives over time.

However, while some best practices were noted in the area of centrally managed real property and the vehicle fleet, the governance framework for the management of capital assets presents opportunities for improvement in the areas of accountability, roles and responsibilities.

The audit also concluded that key cost and performance information has not been adequately defined and captured for a number of capital asset classes, and as such the information for department-wide decision making is not complete. While some of these issues have been mitigated by various facets of the Integrated Investment Planning process and the partial implementation of the ALM module, improvements to key information necessary to efficiently managed capital assets are still required.

The audit team concluded that significant progress has been made in implementing the recommendations emanating from the CESD audit report on the Management of Severe Weather Warning completed in 2008. MSC has been populating the Asset Lifecycle Management application since its implementation and the accuracy of the data and content is becoming increasingly relevant to lifecycle management decision making. Additionally, initial work is underway to develop more meaningful performance measurement metrics to further assist with decision making, however due to conflicting priorities, not all the required data is accessible, which is impacting MSC’s reporting ability. As future progress is largely dependent on the implementation of SAP, the Audit and Evaluation Branch decided to stop tracking the implementation of the CESD recommendations on the understanding that these issues will be monitored through the follow-up to the recommendations included in this report, as well as the existing system under development audit of SAP.