Significant audit effort is being mounted to audit the accounts of the Government of Canada. First and foremost, we do work at the component level; by that, I mean the various parts that make up the whole of the public accounts. This means that we need to have all the plans for major components, such as significant departments and agencies. Then there are also crown corporations and other entities that form part of the public accounts. Again we need to derive audit assurance to be able to come to an overall conclusion that supports a clean audit opinion.
In this particular year it was rather challenging, in the sense that this was the year that many organizations changed their accounting framework, as I have indicated in my opening statement. This means that some organizations were perhaps changing from the old Canadian GAAP—Canadian generally accepted accounting principles—to the public sector standard, the PSAB standard. When they do that, there is not too much that we need to do, because they are aligned with the underlying accounting framework for the Government of Canada. But wherever you have some of the entities that are moving to IFRS, some adjustments are needed.
In fact, when you look at the statements on page 2.5 you will see that there are transitional adjustments. This is near the bottom of the page. There was no budgetary figure for it, but “Transition Adjustment (Note 11)” notes it as $3.3 billion.
So there are significant adjustments that got rolled up, and we needed to come to terms with the Comptroller General's side in terms of how to account for them. Some of these adjustments, because they are incorporated from a pick-up perspective as opposed to a line-by-line consolidation, actually change the investment line indirectly to the accumulated deficit line.
So we put a lot of audit efforts through in order to be able to support this audit opinion. It is the largest financial statement audit within the Office of the Auditor General.