NSERC and SSHRC say “nothing to report” contract filings for 2017 to 2020 were human error

Two of Canada’s main research funding councils are listed in the federal government’s “nothing to report” contract file for quarters in which they also published contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, and both councils now say the nil entries were a mistake.

The federal “Proactive Publication – Contracts Nothing to Report” file, pulled from open.canada.ca on Nov. 5, 2026, lists the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) as having nothing to report for 10 quarters: all four quarters of 2017-18 and of 2018-19, and the second and third quarters of 2019-20. In the main register of contracts over $10,000, NSERC has 342 contracts in those same 10 quarters, worth about $25.6 million. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) is marked nil for nine quarters between 2017-18 and 2019-20, and the register shows 210 SSHRC contracts in those quarters, worth about $12.1 million.

The two files cannot both be right. A quarter cannot have nothing to report and also have contracts to report. The pattern is not limited to these two councils: our analysis found 36 organization-quarters where an organization was marked nil and also had contract rows, with the largest by value at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

NSERC and SSHRC answered jointly on Nov. 13, before the 5 p.m. ET deadline we set. Their media relations team said that during the disclosure input process for the quarters in question, certain fields for both councils “were inadvertently filled in the NIL input tab, due to human error.” That automatically triggered a nil flag in parallel with the contract disclosures that were entered in the contracts tab, which “resulted in an inconsistency in the separate published reports.” The councils said they are implementing corrective measures to remove the incorrect nil reporting, and that the error has not reoccurred since.

They also said the contract data reported at the time was accurate and complete and followed the validation process in place. We have not independently audited the individual contracts, and this story does not suggest any contract was improperly awarded or hidden. The contracts are in the public register; the nil flags are the part that is wrong.

The mistake matters mostly for people who use the data. Anyone who relies on the nothing-to-report file to find out which organizations had no contracts in a quarter would wrongly conclude that two of the country’s largest research funders signed none for most of a three-year stretch. The councils’ reply also shows how such a flag can be created without anyone noticing: a single keying error in an input tab produced a public statement that contradicts the same organization’s own contract list, and it stayed in the published file for years.

The councils have not said when the incorrect entries will be removed. As of our Nov. 5 download they were still in the file.

How we checked: We downloaded the nothing-to-report file and the contracts-over-$10,000 register from open.canada.ca on Nov. 5, 2026, matched them by organization and quarter, and spot-checked the live datastore for NSERC and SSHRC. We sent NSERC and SSHRC written questions on Nov. 10 and gave them until 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 13 to respond. We are not alleging wrongdoing; the story is about what the published records show.

Edited by Harry Miller.