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Despite a total cost so far of $1.2-billion, Ottawa's plan to provide electronic health records to half of all Canadians by next year are set to fail, the Auditor-General said Tuesday.

"It will be very difficult to achieve that objective," Sheila Fraser said at a news conference, saying that Canada Health Infoway's efforts have so far reached only 17-per cent of the population, or one-third of the goal.

As a result, the Auditor-General called on the agency to restate its major objective and to provide clearer information to Canadians.

Ms. Fraser also raised questions about the agency's contracting practices. There was no hint of the scandals that recently engulfed eHealth Ontario, but still evidence of "control weaknesses" that allow contracts to balloon well beyond their initial purposes.

A one-year contract that was originally valued at $144,000, for example, was amended five times in less than three years, bringing its total value to $726,000.

"This practice is not conducive to the fair and transparent awarding of contracts and it raises questions about the appropriateness of Infoway's contracting policy," the report said.

The nine senior managers at Infoway received an average full-time remuneration of $430,000, sharing a total of $3.9-million in salaries, car allowances, bonuses and pension contributions.

Infoway has received $1.2-billion in federal funding since its creation in 2001. Half of the money has already been spent, while the rest has been committed to specific projects, often in partnership with the provinces.

However, Infoway estimates that the total cost of implementing electronic health records across Canada will cost at least $10-billion.

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