St. Albert city councillors experienced an absolute first Feb. 4.
At their second regular meeting of the year, they received the Internal Audit Committee’s annual report. But as chair Coun. Sheena Hughes said, since the committee has never actually given a year-end presentation, it was actually a 2015-24 roundup.
She said the committee’s story began with members of the city administration who were skeptical, to put it mildly.
“This was met with a lot of resistance, to the point where some people thought it was illegal to have this committee, which is clearly not the case,” Hughes said.
“With a change in leadership” in 2017, council passed a bylaw establishing the committee’s parameters.
Its first audit, into procurement, was completed in 2019. The timing was apt.
“It’s a department no one thinks about until they desperately need to buy something,” she said. “In 2019, they weren’t online and [we] know what happened in 2020. This allowed the department to function and allowed for purchases that wouldn’t have happened if they had had to be done on paper.”
From there, the committee went through a risk-management exercise that drives what departments are selected for audits.
Hughes said a department isn’t selected for an audit because it is performing poorly, but according to the scale of how bad it would be if something were to go wrong in that area.
That includes the most recent completed audit, into the city’s cybersecurity apparatus.
“They said the highest risk was cybersecurity, not because there was an issue with it, but because if there are issues, it can be catastrophic to the organization,” she said.
The committee holds an annual workplan meeting in March, agreeing what audits should take place in the next three years.
The current plan sees a human resources planning review in 2025, an audit into aging infrastructure management in 2026 and on digital transformation in 2027.
Hughes said if cybersecurity is the wall around the fort, digital transformation will look at whether the city is optimizing the use of technology to the benefit of its employees and St. Albert residents.
Coun. Mike Killick asked whether there were any changes or budget requests on the way as a result of the cybersecurity audit completed in 2024.
Hughes told him a plan was in the works and would be presented later this quarter, along with monetary asks if needed.
“They just got the plan in October,” she said. “One of benefits of the audit is it says, ‘here’s where you are and here’s where you should go,” where would be good to invest. Now administration is in the process of figuring out how to implement it.
“It could be a while,” she warned. “Procurement took years.”
