Introduction
All departing Statistics Canada employees are required to complete an Employee Clearance Notification form to ensure that all documents, reference materials and equipment assigned to employees are returned prior to their leaving the Agency. An electronic version of this form was developed to facilitate this process for the employees to better meet this requirement and to address related issues.
Objectives
A privacy impact assessment of the electronic Employee Clearance Notification form was conducted to determine if there were any privacy, confidentiality and security issues, and if so, to make recommendations for their resolution or mitigation.
Description
The electronic version of the Employee Clearance Notification form was developed and added to the Data Access Request System which is available on Statistics Canada’s Administrative Systems Portal. The completion of the electronic version of this form will be less onerous on employees. When completing the paper version, there were eleven different signatures that employees needed to obtain by going from one section to another throughout the Agency. In reality, there were many drawbacks: because the process was very time-consuming and many employees did not obtain all signatures which meant, in certain instances, there were outstanding issues that had to be dealt with after the employees’ departure.
As well departing employees were also asked to do an exit survey that was often not completed because employees did not have the time. Requesting that employees do this exit survey on-line will be part of the new process.
Using the electronic Employee Clearance Notification form, employees will be able to initiate the process earlier in anticipation of their departure which should assist in ensuring the full completion of the form by all responsible areas. Hence this improvement will allow the better management of the return or re–assignment of any documents, material and equipment previously assigned to these employees. It is also anticipated that the new process will also result in an increase in the number of completed exit departure surveys.
Conclusion
This privacy impact assessment did not identify any privacy risks that cannot be managed using either current safeguards or others that have been specifically developed for the implementation of the electronic version of the Employee Clearance Notification form.