A federal agency that's supposed to ensure government hiring is fair and transparent is being accused of cooking four employment contracts.

The Public Service Commission of Canada issued four sole-source contracts last fall after allowing the favoured candidates to vet their own job descriptions beforehand, says a public watchdog group.

And that amounts to stacking the deck so that any other potential candidates don't stand a chance, charges Canadians for Accountability.

Commission officials "consulted with the designated consultants to tailor the contracts to those individuals," spokesman Michael Dagg wrote last week in a letter of complaint to Treasury Board President Stockwell Day.

Calling it a "major breach" of the government's procurement policy, the group is demanding an investigation.

But a spokeswoman for the Public Service Commission says no rules were broken. "The PSC has met all the contracting requirements of the government of Canada," Annie Trepanier said in an email.

She called it "common practice" to allow a proposed contractor to see a job description before it's posted to ensure the person meets the minimum requirements.

The four sole-source contracts, each worth $21,000 but renewable for up to $84,000 for three additional years, were posted on a contracting website last September. The first term runs until Nov. 9 this year.

The commission, whose goal is to ensure public-service appointments are "based on the values of access, fairness, transparency and representativeness," was looking for qualified members for its independent audit advisory committee.

Each posting said there would be no job competition because "only one person is capable of performing the work" -- even though the job description was identical in all four cases and four different candidates were awarded the jobs.

Canadians for Accountability is an Ottawa-based citizens' watchdog that monitors the federal government's procurement policies and the treatment of whistleblowers.

The non-profit group was co-founded in 2008 by Allan Cutler, a former federal public servant and whistleblower in the sponsorship scandal, whose career was damaged for speaking out.

Cutler was later recruited by the Conservative party to run as a member of Parliament for Ottawa South in the 2006 election. He lost to Liberal David McGuinty.

The group used the Access to Information Act to obtain internal emails that show the four candidates were involved in shaping their own job requirements. Security requirements, for example, were changed after their input.

The four sole-source contracts were announced in September under federal rules that give other potential candidates just 15 days to demonstrate they also have the required qualifications.

These so-called Advance Contract Award Notices or ACANs have been a source of aggravation for the business community, which says the notices often provide cover for departments that want to put the fix in for favoured contractors.

A business magazine compared ACANs with a "race where one contestant gets a head start, before the others even know there's a race."

The four successful applicants -- Jacques Bourgault, Janice Cochrane, Elma Heidemann and Martha Hynna -- had each been given two previous contracts with the commission, worth between $6,500 and $16,000. Hynna was also employed at the commission in 1996.

Canada's new procurement ombudsman, Shahid Minto, slammed ACANs in his first-ever report to Parliament last summer, calling them a "problem child."

Minto noted, for example, that there's rarely evidence that departments using them have conducted proper searches for other qualified contractors.

Cutler, whose expertise was in procurement when he was a public servant, said he knew something was wrong when the four sole-source contracts popped up on the web last September.

"As soon as I saw it, it stood right out," he said in an interview.

"You can't have four people who are the only ones who can fill that job -- and all the jobs are identical. ... The people in charge of procurement should never have allowed this to happen."

Trepanier said no other interested applicants came forward in the mandatory 15-day period after the contracts were posted.

Minto said his office will launch a followup investigation this fall to determine whether any improvements to sole-source contracting have been made. His report last summer examined $1.7-billion in such contracts signed between 2005 and 2007.