Introduction

The International Trade Personnel Program (ITPP) was launched in March 1995. The ITPP addressed two important concerns in the Canadian economy of the day: enhancing competitiveness in the global marketplace and facilitating youth employment. In addition to increasing the ability of firms in western Canada to export, the ITPP had the important goal of providing employment to recent graduates while increasing the knowledge base in trade development. The ITPP was discontinued in 2005.

Audit Context

It is possible that in the future, WD may be tasked to offer business assistance programs similar to the ITPP that WD discontinued in 2005. To support WD's commitment to management excellence, it is prudent to undertake an end-of-program internal audit to assess the effectiveness of the controls used to deliver programs like ITPP, and to identify any opportunity for improvement that could be applied to future programs of similar design and delivery. The lessons learned from this audit and the audit of First Jobs in Science and Technology, a similar program with different objectives that was completed simultaneously, will be beneficial in future program planning and design.

Audit Scope

The ITPP was announced in March 1995 and discontinued in 2005. To ensure the relevance and currency of the audit, the audit period was limited to project payments and approval transactions completed from April 01, 2002 to March 31, 2007. While project approvals ceased in 2005, WD commitments were honoured until 2007. This departmental-wide audit covered all WD regions and headquarters.

Audit Objectives

The objectives of the audit were:

• To assess the controls that were in place for the ITPP and their effectiveness;
• To provide WD Senior Management with assurance whether or not payments made to recipients were in accordance with the terms and conditions of the programs; and
• To make recommendations for control and due diligence improvements for future programs of a similar design and delivery.

Audit Criteria

The audit criteria were drawn from contribution agreement terms and conditions, other government wide post-graduate initiatives, WD's due diligence and program assessment review procedures, and the TBS Policy on Transfer Payments. The selected audit criteria to guide the conduct of the audit were:

• A business risk and management control framework exists;
• Projects qualified for funding;
• The company and graduate were eligible and qualified;
• WD complied with authorities;
• Claims and payments were supported by adequate documentation; and
• WD performed sufficient due diligence throughout the project life cycle.

The results of examining these criteria have been summarized based on four ratings:

• (4) Criteria met;
• (3) Criteria mostly met;
• (2) Criteria partially met; and
• (1) Criteria not met.

Risks Assessed

The ITPP audit assessed the following program-specific risks to ensure the management control framework was sufficient to mitigate the following:

• WD program objective were not met;
• Federal values and ethics were not respected;
• Non-qualifying projects were approved;
• Recipients were not eligible companies;
• Projects did not have international content and initiatives;
• Individual beneficiaries were not recent graduates;
• WD did not apply appropriate due diligence in monitoring the program's success; and
• Disbursements were not made in accordance with terms and conditions of contribution agreements.