OTTAWA—The federal government’s $1.9-billion IT department is having trouble showing if it’s saving Ottawa any money and is beset with delays, according to auditor general Michael Ferguson’s office.

Shared Services Canada was created in 2012 to centralize and improve the federal government’s scattered IT landscape, while cutting costs by delivering tech support centrally.

Trouble is, the department doesn’t have a way of actually measuring if they’re improving services or cutting costs.

“They don’t really have a baseline that documents whose going to do what, what levels of services should the departments expect to have, what type of information should they expect to receive, to give them an indication of how their systems are being managed,” Ferguson said Tuesday.

“I think the task that they set for themselves from the beginning was ambitious and complex, so really I think it’s up to them to demonstrate how they’re going to meet that goal . . . . They have a big job ahead of themselves.”

Ferguson’s audit found that SSC had no process to determine costs or measure progress and savings, and the agency’s senior management were briefed with unclear or inaccurate reports about progress.

The auditor general’s office tabled its fall 2014-15 reports to Parliament Tuesday, dealing with issues from dangerous and illegal exports slipping by border guards, the lack of progress on government considering gender-based analysis, and a series of concerning issues with the First Nations Health Authority in British Columbia.

But the issue most likely to dog the new Liberal government is the costly problems in modernizing Ottawa’s technology.

SSC was created in 2012 under the previous Conservative government with a mandate to consolidate the government’s IT services under one roof. The department was asked to create a unified email service and consolidate 485 data centres into seven.

Three years later, the department had migrated 3,000 emails to the new Canada.ca address, rather than the 500,000 they were expected to. When auditors were conducting their report, 463 data centres were still in operation.

On top of the delays, the auditors found that the agency, which has a $1.9-billion budget, failed to account for the costs other departments would incur in the migration to the shared system. One department interviewed by the auditors estimated the cost of updating their legacy systems at $24 million.

Auditors found that Treasury Board, the department responsible for the government’s overall technology plan, does not have a strategy for government-wide IT investments and service delivery.

Tony Clement, the former minister responsible for Treasury Board who announced SSC’s creation in 2011, declined a request for comment Tuesday. He deferred to the Conservatives’ Public Works critic, Steven Blaney, who was not available for an interview.

In the House of Commons, NDP MP David Christopherson asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau how the Liberals plan to address Shared Services continued problems.

“Obviously we have much to learn from the auditor general’s report, and indeed, how we deliver services including Shared Services . . . in a responsible way is extremely important,” Trudeau responded. “What we’ve seen through our first months is it’s not enough to do like the previous government and simply announce things. It’s actually important to follow up on them, give the tools to get things done, and execute them responsibly.”

Speaking to reporters, Christopherson said he wasn’t sure if the Liberal government should start from scratch on the Shared Services file, or if improvements would allow the agency to hit its target of a complete IT transformation by 2020.

“Given the mess that it is right now, it may very well make more sense for them to start all over, because the problem seems to be that they didn’t do things right at the beginning,” Christopherson said.

“If there’s waste as a result of that, the Conservatives own it. The Liberal responsibility from now on . . . is to make the right decisions.”

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