I understand that. It looks like there were a lot of things out of control at that time and you had to seek a lot of advice on the matter.
But I want to come back to one point that I still think shows that--sorry, Mr. St-Jean--it doesn't look like the government learned a whole lot here. I want to raise the point because the payables at year-end...your guidelines for Treasury Board say:
This policy states that costs for large system development are to be recorded as expenditures against a departmental appropriation in the year when they are incurred, rather than when they become due and payable under a contract.
I am quite surprised, after all this turmoil we went through here in accounting error number one and in accounting error number two, that lo and behold we get this $15 million amount. You've amortized that thing out over 15 years, and you're not bringing that in as a full liability in the year 2004-05, which seems to me is what that policy obviously states, and I think it's a general accounting thing too. I mentioned that yesterday.
If you take out a $50 million mortgage on your business, when you look under the liability section it's not going to be $1 million for year one; it's going to be booked as $50 million. But this isn't what we're doing here with this accounting work. We're trying to do the same things we were doing before. I'm not sure that the watchdog and the guardian of parliamentary spending and control here is really serious about making sure the rules are followed and the laws are followed around here, because we're just going along with what I think is an unacceptable way of accounting for money.