In terms of the preparation time, that would probably be best answered by the government officials themselves.
From an audit perspective, I could relate to my experience about a month and a bit ago when we were just closing off all the documentation on the current public accounts. My staff was already in my office asking me questions about planning for the 2013-14 audit. So, the exercise is really quite involved, and both sides start rather early looking at this.
One of the things we do is that, notwithstanding that the accounts are clean and there are no observations that would prevent us from providing that clean opinion, we would usually have discussion about areas of improvement. If we can have conversation early, then we can perhaps help the government make those modifications early on in the year, rather than coming in and telling them at the end. So improvements can be made a bit earlier.
So we start conversation with the office of the comptroller general and, separately, at the departmental level, there's a lot of ongoing conversation relating to the public accounts audit.