An electronic sweep of a major federal department has found hundreds of copies of what appears to be pirated software.

And that lack of control at Natural Resources Canada has placed the department "at risk of legal liability with associated financial damages," says a new audit.

Investigators used a powerful program that electronically probed thousands of computers on the department's networks to determine whether they contained popular software products.

The totals were then compared with the number of software licences registered centrally.

The probe detected 6,504 copies of Microsoft Office Standard Edition (2003), for example, but only 5,200 licences. And of 4,384 copies of Corel (WordPerfect) Office located on workstations, only 4,100 licences could be found.

Auditors also visited three offices within Natural Resources that are not required to register their licences centrally — and found that in two of them, there were more software users than licences.

The report warned that not only is the department exposed to legal action, but rogue software could import damaging viruses into the networks.

"There is no managed control to prevent unauthorized software from being installed," the audit concludes. "There is inadequate monitoring and reporting."

Rights may exist to install extra copies

A spokeswoman for the department said officials are planning an electronic inventory of all commercial, off-the-shelf software this summer with a report to senior management in the fall.

Micheline Joanisse also cautioned that the apparent discrepancy between the number of software copies and licences does not necessarily indicate a problem.

"Licences owned by the department give it the right to install additional copies on an authorized user's second computing device, e.g., [a] laptop, so long as the devices and the product are not used concurrently," she said in an email.

The audit, carried out between November 2007 and August 2008, was made final March 30 and released last week.

The department spent $7.1 million on software in 2008-09.

Natural Resources has come under fire previously for its lax management of technology.

An audit made public last year found that cellphone and BlackBerry use was out of control. Few rules were laid down, there was no central inventory and workers who cut their own expensive service deals cost taxpayers up to $500,000 a year in wasted wireless spending.