Receipt — The delivery scoreboard: what the federal government reports about its own targets

A Receipt is a dated evidence summary for one product. It shows the question, the current answer, the sources, the method, the limits, and the next update.

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The question	How many of the federal government's own performance targets does it report meeting — and how many does it report on at all?
Current reading	The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat publishes one file that carries every federal departmental result indicator, the target it was assessed against, the result reported against it, and a verdict on whether the target was met. The verdicts are the reporting organizations' own: each organization selects the indicator, sets the target, reports the result and records the status. Nothing in the file is audited, and Countability verifies none of it. What follows counts what was reported. For fiscal 2024-25, federal organizations reported 2,725 departmental result indicators. They recorded 1,510 as met and 686 as not met. On the remaining 529 they recorded no verdict at all: 289 as “to be achieved”, where the date the target is assessed against had not arrived, and 240 as “not available”, where no result was on hand to compare with the target. That produces two rates, and both belong in the same reading. Of the 2,196 indicators that reached a decided verdict, 68.8% were reported met. Of all 2,725 indicators reported, 55.4% were reported met. The first rate answers “of the targets it judged, how many did it judge met?” The second answers “of the targets it published, how many did it report meeting?” They are different questions and they have moved differently. Across the five reported years the rate on decided indicators rose from 62.6% in fiscal 2020-21 to 68.8% in fiscal 2024-25, with its highest reading in fiscal 2023-24 at 69.1%. The rate on all reported indicators rose further over the same window, from 45.6% to 55.4%, because the denominator moved underneath it: the share of indicators carrying no verdict fell from 27.1% to 19.4%. In indicator counts, the latest year carries 268 more reported met than the first, 56 fewer not met, 75 fewer to be achieved and 134 fewer not available, against a total that moved by 3. A rising met-rate and a shrinking undecided share are two descriptions of one movement in this record, and the record does not separate a change in what was delivered from a change in what was reported on. The indicator set does not hold still either. Of the 2,722 indicators reported for fiscal 2020-21, 899 — a third of them — do not appear in the fiscal 2024-25 file at all, and 902 of that year's 2,725 were not in the 2020-21 file. The identifiers present in all five reported years number 1,822, and they carry a higher reported met-rate throughout: 70.4% on decided indicators in fiscal 2024-25, against 65.4% for the rest of that year's set. The 899 that stopped appearing had already been reported met less often in their base year — 58.3% of their decided verdicts — than the 1,823 that carried through to the latest year, at 64.5%. This file records that an identifier appeared or stopped appearing. It records no reason, and none is supplied here. Organizations differ widely on the same measure. Among the 26 organizations that reached a decided verdict on at least 30 indicators in fiscal 2024-25 — together 1,416 of the 2,196 decided indicators that year — the share reported met runs from 32.4% to 96.9%, with a middle value of 70.9%. Across all 88 organizations reporting any decided indicator, the middle value is 75.0% and the readings span the whole scale, because 30 of those organizations reached a verdict on fewer than ten indicators and one indicator moves such a share by more than ten points. Every organization here chose its own indicators and set its own targets, so a difference between two of these shares is a difference between two self-set bars at least as much as between two performances.
Evidence reviewed through	2026-07-10
Basis	The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat's own published performance file for Departmental Plans and Departmental Results Reports, held here as one preserved edition under a content hash: 19,010 rows, of which 13,723 are Departmental Results Report rows covering fiscal 2020-21 through 2024-25 and 5,287 are Departmental Plan rows covering fiscal 2025-26 and 2026-27. Every figure on the product is a count over those rows, or a share derived from two such counts. Only Results Report rows are scored; Plan rows are counted and never scored. Nothing is copied from the issuer's own commentary, and no departmental narrative report is read into this product.
Method	Pinned, cited evidence; no scenario is computed — every figure restates a pinned, re-derivable value from the product's member Resolutions.
Confidence	The arithmetic is exact over a content-hashed file, and every count and share on the product reproduces from those bytes on one stated convention; the derivation refuses to run at all if the archived bytes do not hash to the pinned value, if the indicator key stops being unique, or if a plan row ever arrives carrying a verdict. What the product deliberately does not settle is whether any of these verdicts is correct. Each is the reporting organization's assessment of its own target, and the field that would let an outside reader check one against an independent series is documented by the issuer and not published.
Next trigger	The Treasury Board's next republication of the performance file. No publication schedule for it is recorded here; the republication that first carries fiscal 2025-26 results will also be the one that removes the fiscal 2025-26 plan rows this record holds.
Next evidence	The next preserved edition of the performance file: it adds a reported fiscal year to the scoreboard and, by the same act, deletes plan rows no public archive other than this one would hold.
Expiry	The reading holds for the March 2026 edition of the file; the next preserved edition either re-affirms it or changes it on the record, with this product's correction history intact.

Material definitions

A verdict is the reporting organization's own published status against its own target, taken exactly as published. It is not recomputed from the target and the result, not overridden, and not verified — by the Treasury Board or by Countability.
A decided verdict is one reported as met or as not met. An indicator reported as to be achieved or as not available has no decided verdict, and is counted in the second denominator only.
Two shares are published for every fiscal year: the share of decided verdicts reported met, and the share of all indicators reported that year recorded met. Quoting one without the other reports a movement in the basis as a movement in delivery.
A share is two integer counts divided, expressed as a percent and rounded half away from zero to one decimal — on the percent, never on a count.
An indicator is identified by the issuer's own indicator identifier within a fiscal year. That pairing is verified unique across all 13,723 Results Report rows on every build rather than assumed.
The four published verdicts are every value the status column takes on a Results Report row, so counting all four is a decomposition of the whole rather than a selection from it.
Organizations are compared on one variable, one fiscal year, one edition of the file, one basis and one evaluation method, computed identically for each and listed alphabetically. No score is composed, no measures are combined or weighted, and no organization is graded.

Decisive limitations

Every status on this product is self-reported by the organization it describes, against a target that organization set, on a methodology it states in its own words. Consistency across organizations is not established and cannot be established from this file.
A met target is not a measured outcome. Nothing here states, or can support, that a target worth meeting was met, that meeting it changed anything, or that an organization reporting a higher share performed better.
The organization table is a matched comparison of one measure and is not a ranking. It carries no rank column, no composite score and no better-organization verdict, and it supports none.
The issuer documents a field naming each indicator's data source and does not publish it, so no indicator in this file can be checked against an independent official series. This product counts verdicts; it verifies none of them.
An indicator identifier that stops appearing is an absence in the file. This product asserts nothing about why one stopped appearing, and nothing about why any status moved: the file records what was reported, never why.
The same identifier is not guaranteed to be the same indicator across years. Of the 1,822 identifiers present in all five reported fiscal years, 596 carry a published name that is not identical across them and 882 carry a recorded target that is not.
Departmental Plan rows and Departmental Results Report rows share no fiscal year, so no plan can be compared with the report that follows it. The plan rows for a fiscal year are deleted from this file when that year's results are published, which is why the file is preserved on capture.
One preserved edition, not a live feed: the issuer's March 2026 edition of the file, captured 2026-07-10, whose latest reported fiscal year is 2024-25.
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. Source: Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, GC InfoBase — Departmental Plans and Departmental Results Reports: performance information by program and by organization, 2026-03-19.

Key sources and licences

GC InfoBase — Departmental Plans and Departmental Results Reports: performance information by program and by organization — Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat Licence text read in full

This Receipt names the public sources and method needed to reproduce the figures it covers. Corrections are dated and explained, with the earlier published record retained.