Auditor General Denise Hanrahan has released her performance audit of the province’s food inspection and licensing program.

The audit covers a two-year period between 2019-2021, and looked at whether government inspections of 60 businesses that make, or serve food were done, and done right.

But it found that both the Department of Health and Digital Government/Service NL failed to maintain proper oversight and good management of the inspection and licensing program, which may have increased the risk to the eating public.

Health policies were found to be out of date, with no oversight beyond annual Service NL reports, which were not filed for the audit period.

Further, Service NL did not do the minimum number of required annual inspections, and wrongly tallied stats which may have made a report look better than it really was. Shops in more remote areas of the province took longer to get to, if at all, and some licences were delayed by up to two years.

Anyone wanting to complain about any of that would also be hard-pressed, since there is no established process to do so.

But it’s among the AG’s recommendations accepted by both departments to clean up and update how they work together to reduce the overall risk of people getting sick, or worse.