Treasury Board fixes two contract records 100 times too high

The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat says it has corrected two records in the federal government’s public contracts register after Canada News Media asked why they showed values exactly 100 times higher than matching records, including a $253-million deal that was really worth $2.5 million when signed.

The first record, for Excel Human Resources under procurement number 240622403A, showed an original and latest value of $253,063,500. A second record for the same vendor, number and April 1, 2013 start date listed an original value of $2,530,635. On its face, the larger record made it the sixth-largest Treasury Board contract in the register, behind only insurance contracts with Sun Life and Canada Life.

A second pair followed the same pattern. Advanced Chippewa Technologies was listed under procurement number 2BS530005 at $7,256,147, against $72,561.47 in another record for the same April 1, 2015 start date.

Together the two records overstated Treasury Board contracting by about $257.7 million. Treasury Board contracts dated in 2013-14 totalled $389.6 million in the register when Canada News Media downloaded it on Oct. 23, or $136.5 million without the Excel record.

In an emailed response on Nov. 2, the secretariat said it checked both records against the contract documents and “confirmed that the original contract values displayed for those records are incorrect.” It said the Excel contract’s original value was $2,530,635 and its total with amendments was $5,652,895.39. The Advanced Chippewa contract’s original value was $72,561.47 and its total with amendments was $217,684.41.

Both are older records, from before Ottawa moved contract reporting to the Open Government Portal in 2017, and the secretariat said some older contract records were transferred there. It said information on proactively published contracts does not feed a specific report for the secretariat or government-wide totals. The portal’s public visualization tool does show totals, it said, but only for contract records from Jan. 1, 2020 onward, so the two errors did not affect it. The records lacked a reporting period, it said, because that requirement took effect on March 23, 2017, after the contracts were awarded.

Canada News Media also asked whether the secretariat has reviewed other rows in its historical file. The response did not address that. Our comparison of about 1.3 million contract rows for other records exactly 100 or 1,000 times larger than a twin found no more.

Nothing in the data suggests either company received the inflated amounts.

How we did this. Canada News Media downloaded the Government of Canada’s proactive disclosure of contracts over $10,000 on Oct. 23, 2026, about 1.3 million rows, and searched for records with the same procurement number and department whose values were 100 or 1,000 times a matching record. The records were Contracts-TBS-Historical-14889 and -15309, compared with -04889 and -05309. We have not independently checked the corrected records in a new download.

Source: Proactive disclosure of contracts over $10,000.

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