OGGO – 53.3 – Number of IT Servants Hired – June 5, 2023

IRCC`S Response to a Request for Information Made by the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates on February 15, 2023

Question

Ms. Jenny Kwan:  IRCC has 327 IT employees. That's fewer than half of what Correctional Service Canada has and about half as many as CBSA. Between January 2018 and September 2022, IRCC used 270 IT contracts but only hired 23 permanent positions. If IRCC needs IT for this transformation that the minister's talking about, why isn't IRCC hiring public servants to do this work instead of contracting it out?
How many staff, permanent positions, could the department get with $24.8 million?

Hon. Sean Fraser: For clarification—and I may have to point to my deputy to confirm the numbers—I believe we've added about 160 new IT staff. This would include designers and IT specialists. The bigger point to me is not just the design of the system and people who have IT skills but developing a system where our staff who process ordinary cases will have the ability to use the digital system on the back end.
To my deputy, if there's further clarity you'd like to offer on the numbers, I'd be happy to yield the floor.

Ms. Jenny Kwan: Maybe the minister can have staff table those numbers dating back over the last five years in terms of what the trend is and the dollars spent on contracting out that have gone out correspondingly to date. I think that would be useful.

The other thing, of course, with IT staff is that it includes programmers as well. With my information, programmers were almost 60 times as many contracted out, but there were only two advertisements during this period for regular employees. Again, why isn't the government hiring in-house instead of contracting out? You're talking about $24.8 million for this transformation.

Response

The following are the number of CS/IT (classification) Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) for the past 5 fiscal years:

When considering Headcount (actual # of CS/IT persons on strength), the following are the numbers for the past 5 fiscal years:

Here’s the total spent on IT and Management Consulting for the past 5 fiscal years:

It is to be noted that public servants do not have contract amounts as they are employee and not consultants and this is why we interpreted the question as two folds: 1) # of FTEs in the CS/IT classification 2) total amount spent on consultants.

Below is the number of permanent positions IRCC could fund with $24.8 million (with the caveat that this is solely for the IT classification).

Assumption:
-Full Year Forecast and FTE taken from 2022-23 Forecast

The calculated percentage per classification of the full year forecast of $42.83M was used to determine how many FTEs could be attributed to each classification for a total amount of $24.8M, which would be 267.4 FTEs.

Definition of what was included in IT and Management Consultant actual expenditures

To get these expenditures, we filtered using the General Ledger Code, which provides a description of the nature of the services being provided, or the goods received.

Here are the definitions of the two General Ledger Code that were used:

• IT Consultant: IT Consulting Professional contracting and consulting services that support any information technology service (including distributed computing, application and database development and maintenance, production and operations computing, telecommunications, IT security and IT program management services). These services engage suppliers either to provide contractors to work on a time and materials basis to augment IT staff or to produce one-time solutions (deliverables).
• Management Consultant: Consulting services for financial management, transportation, economic development, environmental planning, public consultation and other consulting services not specifically mentioned in other G/Ls.