“We found monitoring problems with controls reserved for higher-risk items, such as pharmaceuticals and pest control products,” Auditor General Michael Ferguson told reporters after the release of his first report on April 3.
His office’s audit of border controls examined Canada Border Services Agency as well as Health Canada, the Canada Food Inspection Agency, Natural Resources and Transport Canada—four entities with a stake in making sure imported goods don’t hurt the health and safety of Canadians.
The five departments spent $200-million on border safety programs in 2010-2011, according to the audit.
The audit found that while in “most cases” products potentially harmful to Canadians’ health and safety were “adequately controlled” when they reached the border, administrative oversights and a lack of policies resulted in some potentially dangerous products getting through.
“The volume of imports into Canada is so large that it is not practical for federal organizations to apply border controls to every shipment, nor is it necessary. According to the CBSA, it processes and released 13 million shipments of commercial products in the 2010-11 fiscal year, about four million of which were subject to federal import requirements,” the audit said. “Federal organizations must balance the requirement to examine shipments with facilitating the free flow of goods. To do this, they need to have systems and practices that can identify and concentrate on high-risk shipments of commercially imported products. Potentially unsafe products entering Canada without appropriate controls carry risks that could include illness and death. Even a less serious incident can have a significant effect on Canadian consumer confidence in imported products.”
Where there were problems, most arose in cases that involved Canada Border Services Agency and Health Canada. There is no formal arrangement between the two departments that outlines who is responsible for dealing with products like medical equipment and herbal medicine, that fall under Health Canada’s mandate and arrive at the border, something Mr. Ferguson called a “primary weakness.”
From 2000 to 2004, CBSA didn’t do a number of Health Canada’s administrative requirements at the border: the agency was automating its border processes, and Health Canada was still paper-based.
In 2003 Health Canada and CBSA began working on rules to govern how shipments were reviewed at the border. To date, the departments have not finalized any detailed procedures on how to handle the shipments, though they did sign a memorandum of understanding in November 2011.
“Until there is a formal agreement, border services officers do not have consistent instructions on procedures to follow for those products,” the audit states.
Mr. Ferguson noted that Canadians expect CBSA and Health Canada to be able to co-ordinate protection their health and safety, and that the agreement is “a fairly easy fix” and “something that should be done quickly.”
CBSA and Health Canada have responded to the audit, and they are working on laying out everyone’s roles and responsibilities by March 2014.
“Here we are, waiting for a couple of annexes waiting to be written and signed. There isn’t a lot of faith, to be honest, from us in this whole system,” said NDP MP Malcolm Allen (Welland, Ont.), his party’s agriculture critic.
If a department catches wind of a high-risk shipment heading to Canada, it tells CBSA to intercept it at the border. CBSA uses either an automated alert system to pick up on that shipment’s tracking information, or it conducts a border lookout.
There were 250 targets and 47 border lookouts for fertilizers, health products, fireworks, vehicles and tires between November 2010 and June 2011, the vast majority involving Health Canada-regulated products.
The audit looked at a sample of 50 shipments intercepted from an automated alert. While 84 per cent of the time, CBSA followed Health Canada instructions, in 16 per cent they did not.
In 12 per cent of those cases, CBSA officers first detained the shipments but later decided to release them without telling Health Canada, even though that department expected to be notified.
In the last four per cent, CBSA did not even initially detain the shipment, and in one case, a natural health product that Health Canada suspected contained lithium, was allowed through.
When asked by auditors why CBSA officers did not follow instructions in these four per cent of cases, agency officials had no explanation, according to the audit.
The situation is just another reason the two departments need to establish joint procedures, noted the audit.
Auditors also reviewed how CBSA handled instructions from the other organizations. While in the cases of Natural Resources, CFIA and Transport, instructions were mostly entered into the tracking system correctly, that was not always the case with Health Canada’s instructions.
A sample of 44 targeted Health Canada shipments was reviewed. In five per cent of cases, Health Canada’s instructions were changed when they were entered into CBSA’s system. In one case, while Health Canada asked that CBSA detain two health products, CBSA instructions only mentioned one of them.
CBSA and the other departments also got poor marks from the AG’s office for recording the results of border lookouts and searches targeting high-risk shipments. It looked at a sample of 57 transactions from the almost 30,000 that happened in May 2011. In 40 per cent of those transactions, border officers “recorded examination results incorrectly or incompletely,” according to the audit. In 20 per cent of cases, no inspection comments were recorded at all.
Because of this, the audit couldn’t judge whether or not the lookouts and searches were effective, and neither can the departments.
All of the organizations have agreed with the AG’s recommendation that this be improved.
The organizations also had issues sharing the results of border monitoring with each other. They did not systematically let each other know what was going on, and follow-up information on inspections was not consistently recorded. This means that it could not be compared with other results to assess the effectiveness of border administration, according to the audit.
“Moreover, the federal organizations included in the audit do not have monitoring systems and practices in place to know whether these lockouts are implemented correctly or result in the interception of shipments,” said the audit.
“We know the controls are generally working because we tested them, not because the responsible departments were able to tell us so. The Canada Border Services Agency and other departments need to be better at monitoring their controls at the border,” said Mr. Ferguson.
CBSA has told the Auditor General’s Office that it would restructure the way it reviews border inspections and logs the information by this July. Last week the agency was to have started putting a better quality assurance and monitoring system in place. That project should be fully implemented by the end of June 2013, according to the agency.
After the audit was completed, Health Canada expanded on a single-contact pilot program that it started in B.C. and Ontario in 2010. Starting in December 2011, the department designated a single point of contact between Health Canada and CBSA in each region of the country. Previously, CBSA had to contact the Health Canada program responsible for handling the item coming across the border.
The audit notes that this more systematic approach allows CBSA border offices to better-track whether they are meeting Health Canada’s requirements.
CBSA has also been working on a $10-million “single window initiative” since 2005. It is meant to improve the way the agency identifies shipments at the border and shares information with other federal agencies.
But the audit noted that CBSA has repeatedly missed its own deadlines on the project, and that it’s not following the rules for overseeing it. For the past four years, CBSA and 12 other federal organizations have been working on a proposal for asking the government for more funding, something it had intended to complete in 2007.
The AG’s office noted that while it was conducting the audit CBSA was pushing to finish the proposal the end of 2011, and since then the government has announced that the single window project would be implemented for some organizations by the end of 2013.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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