Ottawa confirms a third of Accenture employees working on CEBA are based in Brazil

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A third of the outsourced employees working on a federal COVID-19 business program are based in Brazil, Export Development Canada says, despite the government earlier saying that nearly all of them were in Canada.

The Globe and Mail first revealed last year that international consulting firm Accenture Inc. was given a series of sole-source contracts to help EDC, a Crown corporation, administer the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) program. CEBA was the most widely used pandemic support program for businesses, with more than $49-billion of loans provided to almost 900,000 companies.

Accenture’s CEBA agreement, worth $208-million to date, is one of the largest contracts ever given to a major consulting firm and it was never publicly disclosed. It has since been raised in Parliament as an example of opaque and expensive outsourcing, and the governing Liberals have promised to cut down on such contracts.

The Globe recently discovered that some of Accenture’s work was being done through a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil – a fact that contradicted Ottawa’s assertions last summer that nearly all the Accenture employees working on CEBA were based in Canada.

For weeks, government spokespeople declined to provide more information about the Brazilian employees. This week, they confirmed that about a third of Accenture’s CEBA work force was based in Brazil, doing software development work.

Shelley Maclean, a spokesperson for EDC, said that as of November, 2023, there were 105 workers in Canada and three in the United States working on “front-line delivery” of CEBA, which includes operating a call centre. As well, she said, there is a 46-person team in Brazil configuring the software for a loan-accounting system that Ottawa will start using this year to keep track of CEBA loan repayment.

Conservative senators say Ottawa giving them ‘runaround’ on Accenture’s $208-million CEBA contract

She said the software team will not access the personal information of CEBA loan recipients. “Only the delivery teams at EDC and Accenture handle the data of Canadian small businesses,” Ms. Maclean said in a statement.

Some of the workers are employed directly by Accenture, while others work through one of the more than 600 subsidiaries owned by Accenture worldwide.

NDP MP Richard Cannings, who is the party’s small-business critic, questioned why such a large contract went to a non-Canadian company, especially given the recent revelations that many of the workers involved are also based outside of the country.

“We have big companies in Canada that can handle this work, I’m sure,” he said.

Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which lobbies on behalf of nearly 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses, said he understands why the government may have needed to outsource the work at the beginning of the pandemic in the interests of speed.

However, he said the administration of the program continues to be a mess. Tens of thousands of small-business owners had to pay back their CEBA loans in full early, without any amounts forgiven, because in many cases they could not correct small errors on their applications through the Accenture-run call centre.

“Even today – three years later – small businesses struggle to get answers to basic questions and bizarre administrative processes and errors continue to plague the program,” Mr. Kelly said.

Although the Brazilian employees make up a significant share of Accenture’s work force on CEBA projects, they appear to have received a smaller share of federal funds. A list of contracts and amendments tabled in Parliament in October suggests at least $23-million was directed to the “loan accounting system” being produced by the Brazilian team, which is referred to as “One Financial.” The total value of CEBA contracts given to Accenture is $208-million.

The lower share of money is likely due to salaries in Brazil being lower than in Canada. The U.S. compensation-data company PayScale estimates the average annual salary for a Brazilian software developer at 62,000 Brazilian real, or just under $17,000, while the average annual salary for that job in Canada is estimated at $71,000.