Public Accounts committee  It's about whom they give access to and what type of access they give to those people.

Public Accounts committee  That's right. You're right that we're not talking so much about hacking, although if there aren't good access controls, that could facilitate hacking as well. Primarily, we're looking at this: Only the people who need access should have access, and they should have access only to the parts of the system they need to access.

Public Accounts committee  First, in terms of the item that you talked about on page 132, I'll just give you a brief introduction to that and then perhaps Mr. Huppé will provide you with more details. Essentially this is the write-off of loans. When the government issues a loan, it sets that loan up as an asset on its books.

Public Accounts committee  I can't speak to what any of these particular projects have put in place. We haven't gone to do an audit on them to sort that out. Certainly I think those are the right questions for each of the departments that are responsible for these types of large projects: How are they making sure that the project is going to work?

Public Accounts committee  Again I have to say that we haven't looked at any of these systems individually, so I can't tell you what stage they are at, or with what types of issues they are struggling. One of the things we identified in Phoenix, though, was that all of the information about how that project was progressing was going up through the project managers.

Public Accounts committee  In general, I would say that there are a lot of very capable people in the federal civil service, people who are very capable of managing projects and keeping projects in line. IT projects are particularly difficult, of course. I think one of the big failures in Phoenix was the whole system of oversight—how the oversight was put together.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. The issue we're raising there.... Again, just by way of trying to help parliamentarians understand some of those documents, if you look at the budget, it says there's an amount of $330-something billion that would be budgeted to be spent. If you look at the main estimates to see how much is going to be voted on by Parliament, and how much of that is statutory, so already approved by Parliament, it was $270-something billion.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our audit of the consolidated financial statements of the Government of Canada for the 2017-18 fiscal year. With me is Karen Hogan, the principal responsible for that audit. I'm also accompanied today by Renée Pichard, the principal responsible for our recently tabled commentary on the 2017-18 financial audits, which reports on our financial audits of federal organizations.

Public Accounts committee  That's a question I can't answer. I don't know the reason that deputy ministers in some departments change often. My concern, as I've said before, is that we often see deputies changing in key departments like procurement and national defence. In some of those very large departments, we've seen them change quite often.

Public Accounts committee  I think that's part of the fundamental question we were looking at when we decided to undertake this audit. Again, as you said, among the indigenous population there are higher unemployment rates and lower participation in the workforce. There are all of those indications that indigenous people need help getting into the workforce.

Public Accounts committee  I can't tell you. I'm not quite sure of the last time we did an audit on this type of program, which says to me that maybe it's time for us to go back and look at some of the others. That would be something to come. I don't have the answer right now.

Public Accounts committee  I wouldn't put it that way. The way I would put it is that it's a common problem that we have seen in many government programs. Sometimes the way performance is measured is based on the information that is easy to capture and easy to report, rather than putting together a performance measurement regime that really looks at whether the program has achieved its intended outcome.

Public Accounts committee  I think what you've just heard is that it is extremely difficult to get accurate information at the micro level about jobs, where jobs are available and what types of skills are needed. They have consulted with the statistical experts in the country in Statistics Canada about how they would go about gathering that type of information.

Public Accounts committee  This obviously is a very important program that the department runs. What we focused on was that the objective of this program was to help indigenous people find sustainable and meaningful employment. We feel that if a program has an objective like that—“sustainable and meaningful”—then there needs to be a way to measure whether the people who participated in the program ended up getting sustainable and meaningful employment.

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask Mr. Wheeler to respond to that.