Thank you so much.
I'm joined by Roch Huppé, who serves as the comptroller general of Canada. I aim to be as brief and direct as I can. This is an important dialogue.
I want to start off by emphasizing that the Treasury Board Secretariat accepts the Auditor General's spring 2018 report and Michael Ferguson's personal accompanying commentary. By “accept”, I don't mean grudgingly accept the recommendations. I mean we embrace the analysis and have worked fundamentally to understand and implement those incredibly important recommendations to prevent the tragedy of Phoenix from ever occurring again.
We take this seriously. We're pleased to report on the progress we've made to date. We're also pleased to discuss with this committee some of the limitations and some of the work we frankly have left to continue to do.
I want to speak to three areas of progress and reform and also acknowledge the limits on those. The first has been essentially the rule set for the policy level. The Treasury Board and the secretariat have worked hard to include the policies and directives that guide deputies and other decision-makers. We've put in place a wide number of policies. These are policy reforms. These are publicly available. They're on the web. I think they're quite consistent with those in other governments. They're largely consistent with those that guide large private sector institutions.
Fundamentally, we've established new lines of accountability and standards around IT projects, including some gating and peer review that didn't exist before and an enterprise architecture review board. That sounds kind of boring and jargony, but it means that the chief information officer now has direct eyes on business-critical projects and reviews [Technical difficulty—Editor] prior to investment. We've also put in place a series of other mechanisms and we're happy to answer detailed questions on those in terms of the IT policies.
Roch Huppé, in his role as comptroller general, has been instrumental in establishing new standards for project management. We have senior designated officials and project sponsors for each project, so we actually know who is in charge, which throat to choke and where the primary points of accountability are. We now require concept cases, so we actually know what the projects are about, what they're supposed to be doing and how digital principles can be applied. We've made sure that we've established competency profiles, so that we have some sense of who is in charge of these projects, not only from an accountability perspective, but what their capabilities should be and how we can track that well.
We've also been quite busy working on the HR side. Since April 2020, we have a new set of HR policies in place that effectively increase the flexibilities for deputies to implement their responsibilities with respect to human resources. In particular, deputies can now retrospectively recover performance pay that might have been given in error if the deputy understood in future what they.... Sorry, I won't bother with a detailed explanation. Effectively, we've now given deputies the power to recover performance pay retroactively and also to deploy executives where they need them the most. These are flexibilities that were not available before and are significant reforms.
It's early days and, frankly, the realities of 2020 and 2021 have impaired our ability to collect data and get an early sense of how these reforms are working. We'll continue to monitor and adjust.
These policy changes are important. They're useful and they're directionally correct. I'm very comfortable with them, but I don't take it for granted that they will have the necessary impact. It is something we need to monitor and be on top of. In this area, we're completely and fundamentally on top of the notion of the Auditor General around form and substance. We're paying a huge amount of attention to the application of these new policies with respect to major new programs in terms of income support, immigration reform and, of course, the NextGen of HR-to-pay systems.
These are fundamentally focused on different and more structured methodologies. The early results from these, including the Auditor General's most recent review in February of this year, have shown some real progress. We're very pleased with that.
The last thing I want to talk about is cultural reform. We remain relentlessly focused on the culture of the public service and essentially ensuring that we now have in place enterprise-wide governance for major programs, including a couple of deputy minister committees that I personally chair. Importantly, we are putting in place new internal audit resources to make sure that decision-makers are able to deal with something that they were unable to get in Phoenix, which is a direct line of sight into the actual, independent and verifiable-by-internal-audit understandings of progress against objectives.
We are learning from our experiences in the pandemic where, as Ms. Sherman indicated, we've been able to respond with some considerable agility.
I will finish very briefly by saying that we have the policies and processes in place. We do not take progress for granted. We remain relentlessly focused on making sure that we have policies in place, that we have actual lived experience, that we focus in on the results to date, and that we work with the deputy minister cadre to ensure a great deal of attention on information technology, learning the lessons of Phoenix, and staying on top of these vital areas.
It's much appreciated. We genuinely look forward to questions, because we think this is an incredibly important dialogue. We are pleased to share with this committee our progress and limitations.
Thank you.