Quick Facts

• The Ottawa Police Services retained Bronson to redesign its background clearance fee structure ahead of a 2016 online platform implementation, replacing a pricing schedule that had grown misaligned with the actual cost of service delivery.

• The engagement covered 16 distinct background clearance process types, spanning criminal records checks, police records checks, vulnerable sector checks, adoption and pardon applications, fingerprinting services, and HR screening for new hires and contractors.
• Fees across all 16 process types were rebuilt on a cost-recovery basis, with each check priced to reflect documented processing effort and operational overhead rather than legacy rates.
• The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP) had issued updated LEARN guidelines introducing a new form type that carried no existing fee at the Ottawa Police Services, which the revised schedule addressed for the first time.
• Bronson reviewed existing documentation and fee data, consulted with the Director General and CIO, and delivered a completed fee schedule ready for organizational sign-off.
• The finished fee structure was timed for deployment at the launch of the OPS online background clearance platform, removing any fee-related risk from the go-live window.

Project Description

The Ottawa Police Services administers one of the broadest background clearance functions in the region, processing check requests that range from standard criminal records searches to specialized applications covering adoptions, pardons, vulnerable sector screening, and crime-free multi-housing programs. That operational breadth means the pricing decisions behind the fee schedule carry real financial and compliance consequences: an underprice creates cost recovery shortfalls across high-volume check types, while an undocumented fee leaves a new process type entirely outside the revenue model.

By the time the OPS began planning its transition to an online background clearance platform, both problems were present. The existing fee schedule had not been rebuilt around true delivery costs, leaving a gap between what the Service charged and what those services actually required in staff time, processing resources, and operational overhead. At the same time, the OACP had updated its LEARN guidelines to introduce a new form type that the OPS had not yet priced, creating an unresolved compliance and revenue gap ahead of the platform launch.

Bronson was engaged to bring dedicated business analysis capacity to the problem — reviewing every check type, building a cost-recovery-based pricing model, securing the stakeholder alignment needed for approval, and delivering a fee schedule ready to go live with the platform.

Business Challenge

Rebuilding a fee structure across 16 operationally distinct check types, against a compliance requirement and a platform launch deadline, presented a set of challenges that cut across financial analysis, process documentation, and organizational governance.

The specific challenges Bronson addressed:

• Systematic cost recovery gap. The existing fees had not been set against a documented analysis of delivery costs. Before any new rates could be proposed, Bronson needed to establish what each of the 16 check types actually cost to process, a baseline that required detailed review of processing workflows, staffing requirements, and overhead allocation for each type independently.
• Sixteen process types with no common pricing logic. Criminal records checks for employment, volunteer, and non-resident applicants follow different workflows than adoption applications, pardon applications, or HR screening for officers, civilians, and contractors. The diversity of the check inventory meant no single pricing formula applied across the full schedule. Each type had to be analyzed on its own operational terms.
• An unpriced new process type. The OACP LEARN guideline update introduced a form type the OPS had not previously administered. With no historical cost data, no processing volume history, and no legacy fee to reference, pricing this check required analytical judgment rather than extrapolation from existing rates.
• Compliance alignment requirement. The revised schedule needed to conform to the updated OACP standards, adding a policy alignment dimension that sat alongside the internal cost recovery objective.
• Defined implementation window. The fee structure was being redesigned specifically to go live with the new online platform in 2016. A completed, approved schedule had to be in hand before platform deployment, making the approval timeline a hard constraint rather than an internal target.
• Senior leadership sign-off requirement. The Director General and CIO both needed to review and approve the revised fee schedule before it could be formally adopted. Structured consultation with both principals was a prerequisite to tabling the final recommendations, not an optional step.

The Ottawa Police Services needed a thorough, defensible, and approval-ready fee schedule within a fixed window, work that required both analytical depth and the organizational navigation to move a compliance-sensitive financial document through sign-off on time.