Canada's Call-Centre Agency Said It Checked Bills. Auditors Found Gaps

Canada's federal call-centre procurement agency told lawmakers in October 2025 that it had an established process for checking invoices. A new Auditor General report, published on October 29, 2026, found that Shared Services Canada (SSC) had not adequately verified some payments under the same Hosted Contact Centre Service (HCCS) contract.

The two original public records raise a specific accountability question: what checks did the agency actually perform before paying the technology supplier, and what evidence was retained? They do not establish that IBM Canada submitted false invoices, that funds were stolen, or that SSC's earlier testimony was knowingly inaccurate.

In a House of Commons Public Accounts Committee hearing on October 28, 2025, then-SSC president Scott Jones described the agency's invoice validation process and internal chief-financial-officer reviews. He said the department's contract performance was monitored, its amendments reflected additional services and usage, and the system was operating reliably. Jones also said the agency supported 13 centres on the contract by that date, including some of the federal government's largest.

The Auditor General's October 29, 2026 report examined the original 2015 IBM Canada contract and replacement procurements. Its underlying 28-page audit states that, in the invoices sampled, SSC had not confirmed actual system usage with the Canada Revenue Agency and Employment and Social Development Canada. Auditors also found no documented assessment of invoice reasonableness based on historical usage and forecasts, and limited evidence of approval of professional-services timesheets.

Those findings are about the **scope and documentation of verification in the auditor's sample**. They do not establish that every invoice was incorrect. SSC officials told auditors they compared charges with historical usage and call-volume forecasts, an explanation the report records, but auditors said they found no evidence that such a reasonableness assessment had been completed.

Costs and deployment are separate figures

The 2013 initiative envisaged modernizing technology for about **220 federal call centres**. By June 2020, eight had been moved onto HCCS, with **C$52 million in implementation costs** against an original C$16 million deployment budget. This is a deployment-cost comparison, not a claim that the entire future contract was paid for those eight centres.

The Auditor General says roughly **C$180 million had been spent on the contract by March 2026**. After options and a 14-month extension, the **total contract value is expected to reach C$251 million through 2028**. Contract value, actual expenditure and deployment cost are different measures; none is by itself a finding of criminal loss.

The auditors also found an uncorrected error in the original procurement's pricing information: bidders had not been asked to account for the full cost of data storage. SSC subsequently amended how storage fees were calculated and removed some planned features. The report concluded that the agency did not obtain the best value for money.

In the 2025 committee hearing, Jones disputed treating the original C$50 million minimum revenue guarantee as an initial full contract cost, explaining that it was a supplier assurance rather than a comprehensive estimate. That distinction is relevant: the audit's C$16 million figure concerns **implementation**, while C$50 million was a **contractual minimum guarantee**.

The agency's response and next deadline

SSC **agreed** with the Auditor General's recommendation to prioritize replacing the older systems. In its formal response included in the report, the agency committed to a five-year government-wide technology consolidation plan and said it would deliver a product roadmap and procurement strategy by **March 31, 2027**. It also promised earlier engagement with partner departments and vendors.

The audit warns that the HCCS system will no longer be usable after December 2028. As of July 2026, three centres had migrated to the new cloud-based service, ten remained on HCCS, and other centres still depended on older technologies. The replacement procurements selected Bell Canada in 2025. Auditors noted documentation weaknesses in those procurements but explicitly found that the gaps **did not change vendor selection**.

The report covers April 2015 to July 18, 2026, and was based on evidence sufficient as of October 19. It does not establish the current status of every migration or subsequent improvement. The next verifiable checkpoints are the March 2027 roadmap, the department's documented payment-control changes, and progress toward retiring older systems before their contract deadlines.

The two original records are the 2025 parliamentary transcript and the 2026 Auditor General report.