HALIFAX: The municipalities Auditor General, Andrew Atherton, found that “significant improvement” is required by HRM in its hiring practices.
That was the finding released in the AG report on March 20.
The audit found HRM’s hiring processes lacked direction and guidance to ensure appropriate hiring decisions are made, and this was reflected in the hiring files examined during the audit.
“Overall, individual hiring processes and decisions were not well documented and supported,” said Atherton. “We found issues in every file we looked at.
“Issues included not adequately establishing evaluation criteria, inconsistent and unsupported screening and assessing of candidates, and failing to complete pre-employment checks.”
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The audit also found justifications for the use of appointments were often not well supported.
“For a public employer transparency is especially important; we expected the rationale for limiting competition to be clearly laid out in each case” the auditor general said.
The auditor general’s report includes 17 recommendations which HRM management agreed to implement.
A follow-up report on the 2022 Management of Respectful Workplaces Audit, also released March 20, found limited progress has been made, with only five of the initial report’s 15 recommendations implemented to date.
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Improvements are still required in many areas including developing performance measures, monitoring of training and complaint files, and the establishment of a whistleblower policy.
“HRM Management has been slow to act on known gaps around maintaining respectful workplaces, said Atherton.
“We will continue to follow up on this audit in the future.”
Both reports are available on the auditor general’s website at https://hrmauditorgeneral.ca/published-reports.
