PACP – Opening Statement – December 2, 2025
Standing Committee on Public Accounts
2024 Report 5 of the Auditor General, Professional Service Contracts
December 2, 2025
Thank you, Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Harpreet Kochhar, and I am the Deputy Minster at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).
I acknowledge that we’re meeting on the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg People.
As public servants, we welcome the Auditor General’s work and the opportunity to demonstrate how we continue to strengthen transparency and stewardship in our operations.
I also appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to discuss the Auditor General’s Report 5 on professional service contracts.
My department participated in this audit, which examined 97 federal contracts with McKinsey & Company between 2011 and 2023, including two at IRCC.
In 2018 and 2019, we undertook major service and digital transformation work to improve how we deliver programs to Canadians and newcomers.
To help design and launch that transformation, we engaged McKinsey & Company through two competitive contracts awarded under Public Services and Procurement Canada supply arrangements.
The first contract, valued at $2.9 million, provided an in-depth assessment of the department’s operations and a roadmap for modernization.
The second, valued at $24.8 million including amendments, helped establish our Transformation Office and deliver new digital tools and digital journey labs that improved processing efficiency and client experience.
These engagements were designed to bring in short-term expertise and to build internal capacity—not to outsource our core work.
The Auditor General’s report offered a valuable independent review of those contracts and of the department’s contracting practices more broadly.
The report’s findings were constructive and helpful, and did not identify any integrity or value-for-money concerns specific to IRCC.
The Auditor General did, however, note two administrative issues:
- that our files did not fully record the rationale for one contracting decision
- and that a small number of external consultants received temporary network access before final security clearance was confirmed.
We took those observations seriously.
Since that time, my department has strengthened its documentation and verification processes.
Each procurement decision must now include a written justification, and no external resource can access our systems without documented security clearance confirmation.
We’ve also strengthened conflict-of-interest guidance and expanded training for managers to reinforce oversight and accountability in contracting.
These measures build on controls that are already strong. Both our contracts with McKinsey were competitively awarded, audited and found compliant with Treasury Board and PSPC rules.
This work helped lay the foundation for our ongoing digital modernization—creating a Transformation Office, growing our service design expertise, and creating client tools that make applications faster and easier to use.
My department remains fully committed to stewardship, transparency and continuous improvement.
We appreciate this opportunity to demonstrate the steps we’ve taken and the lessons we’ve applied to continue serving Canadians with integrity.
We will continue to work closely with the Auditor General and central agencies to ensure our procurement practices remain rigorous, transparent and consistently aligned with Treasury Board policy.
Thank you,