This article is an excerpt from The Art of Tendering: A Global Due Diligence Guide, which is available for purchase.
In its June 2019 report entitled Oversight of Contracted Residential Services for Children and Youth in Care, the Auditor General of British Columbia found that the government failed to provide effective oversight of contracted residential services. The report noted that the government failed to consistently define the required services and instead allowed the services to evolve on an ad hoc basis. Furthermore, the Auditor General found that the government failed to monitor the quality of care provided by contractors to children and youth in the residential service portfolio:
Overall, we found that the ministry wasn’t providing effective oversight of contracted residential services. The ministry hadn’t defined what contracted residential services should look like or when these services should be used. Instead, the services had evolved on an ad hoc basis to respond to individual and emergency situations.
The ministry also hadn’t created a plan for the right amount and type of services required to meet the needs of children and youth in contracted residential services. Because of this, the ministry was struggling to match the specific needs of individual children and youth to appropriate service providers. For example, Indigenous children and youth were often in placements without an Indigenous cultural component.
We also found that the ministry wasn’t monitoring the quality of care that contractors provided, partially because the ministry hadn’t set sufficient standards for the services it contracted. In the end, this led to a higher risk that the children and youth weren’t receiving the quality or type of services they needed.
Finally, we found that the ministry didn’t have an effective contract management framework in place. The lack of framework meant that ministry staff responsible for managing the contracts didn’t have the right training or support they needed. This led to contracts between the service provider and the ministry that weren’t focused on the needs of the individual child or youth; also, the contracts weren’t appropriately monitored.
More specifically, the report found that this failure to properly define the services undermined the government’s ability to align those services to specific needs and ensure that the taxpayer was obtaining value-for-money for those expenditures:
The lack of clear service descriptions and guidelines has led to the inconsistent use of contracted residential services around the province. As well, many contracted residential services did not provide culturally appropriate support and care to Indigenous children and youth. Without a planned approach to these services, the ministry can purchase expensive services without a clear sense of what they are trying to achieve, and these services may not meet the needs of the children and youth placed in them.
The Auditor General recommended that the government put more focus in proactively defining its program service needs. It also made a series of recommendations in relation to its procurement and contract management practices in the portfolio, stating that the government should improve its management and contract oversight practices by ensuring that roles and responsibilities are appropriately assigned, that responsible staff receive appropriate training and support to fulfill their roles, that contracts include clear and measurable deliverables that focus on the needs of the children, and that regular and effective performance monitoring take place. These recommendations serve as useful guidelines for all public institutions interested in building winning conditions for their contract administration frameworks.
