Auditor General Critical of CAA

On 29 June, the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) released its report to the Transport Minister in relation to its most recent audit of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA)—the fourth such audit of the CAA’s certification and surveillance functions for civil aviation operators. The latest audit was carried out to determine whether the CAA had addressed the 10 recommendations in the OAG’s 2005 report.

The Auditor General, Lyn Provost, reported that despite the CAA’s public statements that it was making good progress in strengthening its certification and surveillance functions, she was of the opinion that the Authority has not made adequate progress in addressing the recommendations made by the OAG in 2005.

According to Provost, of the 10 recommendations made by her office in 2005, she considered that only one—the introduction of a new risk assessment tool—had been fully addressed. She said that eight of the recommendations had been only partly addressed and one recommendation had not been addressed at all.

Notably, the OAG says that unit managers within the CAA’s Airlines Group and General Aviation Group are not tailoring Civil Aviation Rule checklists to reflect the size and risk of operators’ organisations as originally intended. As a result, the scope and depth of surveillance is not adjusted appropriately and operators’ entire operations are subjected to the same level of audit, irrespective of operators’ overall level of risk.

Provost says that weaknesses within the CAA that the OAG has identified previously still remain. She says these weaknesses affect the rigour, consistency and transparency of regulation (editor’s emphasis).

In her view, “the CAA has failed to understand and effectively address the underlying causes of the weaknesses in its certification and surveillance work.” She lists a number of factors that she believes have contributed to the Authority’s inadequate response to the 2005 OAG recommendations:

• Governance of and accountability for the CAA’s certification and surveillance functions are ineffective.
• The strength of the CAA’s regulatory focus is unclear, and there is insufficient guidance to ensure that regulatory responses are appropriately and consistently applied.
• The CAA’s management practices are not focused on improving staff performance and the Authority has not been receptive to change.
• The CAA’s management oversight of implementing and using the new certification and surveillance processes is inadequate.
• The CAA has not given enough attention to improving its organisational proficiency in auditing.

The Auditor General said she was pleased that the Chairman of the CAA’s Board had accepted the recommendations in the latest report, and was committed to ensuring that the CAA addresses them. She said the CAA had also provided the OAG with a description of the actions that it is taking in response to the OAG’s recommendations and a project overview that sets out the timeframe for carrying out those actions. The Chairman has arranged monitoring of and reporting on the CAA’s implementation of the OAG’s recommendations and those resulting from recent internal reviews conducted by the CAA.

However, she also noted that the CAA had made similar commitments to her predecessors and that the necessary improvements have still not been carried out. She added that the responsibility for ensuring that the CAA takes the appropriate action will require closer monitoring and follow-up than the OAG can provide.

The Auditor General recommended that as part of its ongoing monitoring of the CAA, the Ministry of Transport should focus specifically on the CAA’s progress in addressing the changes that the OAG has recommended.