Supporting Documentation: List of legal department names and their respective numbers

Legal Department Names and Department Numbers

The information included in this dataset lists the legal department names of organizations detailed in Schedules I, I.1, and II of the Financial Administration Act that were authorized to use the Consolidated Revenue Fund and interface with the central systems operated by Public Services and Procurement Canada, along with the corresponding department numbers that were assigned to these organizations by the Receiver General. The source for this information is the Government-wide chart of accounts for Canada website.

New Historical View of Department Number Mapping

As of August 2025, this dataset now also includes a historical, fiscal-year-specific view of how this departmental information has evolved since 2006/2007, in addition to the file containing the current, active mapping only.

Looking at the data compiled from 2006 until the present, we can see some instances where the legal name of a department officially changed. For example: in fiscal year 2013/2014, as a result of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Act, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (department number 005) legally changed its name to the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. We can also see that the decision of how to display department names on the Chart of Accounts webpages shifted over time, such as the decision about whether to include the term "Department of" in the names at all and, if so, whether to place the term at the start of each entry, or at the end in brackets.

Note: For the purposes of this dataset, the values shown in the Department-name_English-Ministère_nom_anglais and Department-name_French-Ministère_nom_français fields reflect how the department name was displayed in the Chart of Accounts website in that given year. Given the inconsistencies in the formating year to year, it may be advisable to use the Department_number-Ministère_numéro field for any filtering or joining with other relevant data collections, as this value remained consistent across all relevant fiscal years for an organization.

Department Number Formats

Values in the Department_number-Ministère_numéro column are formatted as three digits (ex: 088). In some other datasets, you may see a letter appended to the end of these three digits (ex: 088a) to highlight a subset of data related to an organization that does not have capacity to maintain its own dedicated Department Financial and Material Management System (DFMS) and must therefore submit their trial balance through the DFMS of another larger host department. While these smaller organizations differentiate their input through the use of this extra letter; their transactions are aggregated into the overarching three-digit department number as represented in this mapping dataset, but segregated using financial coding unique to the hosted department.

The following is a list of the organisations that have historically been including under a larger department's financial system:

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