B.C. Timber Sales’ Okanagan office made so many errors in required reporting on reforestation work that an audit by B.C.’s forestry watchdog deemed them non-compliant, according to a report released Tuesday.
The B.C. Forest Practices Board audit found that on the ground, reforestation and silviculture work was meeting required objectives for its operations within the Okanagan Shuswap Natural Resource District, a 2.25-million-hectare region that stretches from the U.S. border to Salmon Arm.
However, auditors found that almost 20 per cent of required entries into an information-tracking system contained minor errors, such as data-entry mistakes or were late submissions.
“While the errors were administrative in nature, they were numerous and so the auditors considered this non-compliance significant,” Tim Ryan, chairman of the Forest Practices Board, said in releasing the audit results, which covered B.C. Timber Sales activities between June 1, 2015, and June 10, 2016.
The audit report noted that since the audit, B.C. Timber Sales, the Crown agency that manages short-term timber licences on public lands, had implemented a review process to correct deficiencies in its reporting.