Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to make a short opening statement, and then we can move from there. Mr. Chairman, I would like to begin by congratulating you undertaking a study on the roles and responsibilities of the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada. Though I was not a

Public Accounts committee  There are cases under the policies that we have. Of course, we have a significant number of policies, and there are times when a department may not be consistent with the policies that we have put in place. As a result, we would recommend to the Treasury Board that certain action

Public Accounts committee  For example, there could be certain conditions and terms of when they have to come back to the board to seek approval. They may have signed a contract that in fact was not within their authority. These kinds of issues can take place. In those cases, we have a number of tools at

Public Accounts committee  In departments, we are moving to a model in which all departments would have a chief financial officer who is responsible for the overall financial management within that department and reporting through to the—

Public Accounts committee  Again, some of the smaller agencies will not have a chief financial officer. They will have a financial capacity, but not a senior financial officer like in the larger departments.

Public Accounts committee  No. Under the new act, deputy ministers will be designated accounting officers. Basically, under the new act, they will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of their departments and for signing off the accounts of their departments. It basically codifies what's now in pra

Public Accounts committee  No. Again, this is largely the role of the deputy in terms of the day-to-day management of the department, and it has largely developed through precedent. What we are doing now is codifying in the legislation the responsibility of the deputy head as the accounting officer. As a r

Public Accounts committee  Basically, we're trying to legislate to ensure that the accountabilities are clear in terms of the role of the deputy head.

Public Accounts committee  Well, there's no such thing as a contract—

Public Accounts committee  We don't have an employment contract. We don't have that model. The Australian government has that model, and in that model, deputies basically sign contracts. We're saying that under this model we've codified those roles in legislation in order to be very clear about the respons

Public Accounts committee  There are different kinds of consequences. There are what we call the institutional consequences, in terms of certain principles or policies that we set out in the Treasury Board that we expect departments to comply with. We cannot police every single transaction--it's simply not

Public Accounts committee  No. We have a number of different sources that we look at. As I said, we undertake an assessment of their overall competency in the department through our management accountability framework assessment, we review the Treasury Board submissions that come in, and we review internal

Public Accounts committee  I'm going to let David Moloney speak to that.

Public Accounts committee  Perhaps I could add to that. This is why departments over the past number of years have fully adopted our management accountability framework--which is nothing more than that. It's a framework by which they manage their departments. It's been built on modern comptrollership. It s

Public Accounts committee  Under our system, which is going to be reinforced again by Bill C-2, at the end of the day the deputy head is responsible for the day-to-day management of the departments. We undertake assessments of the management competencies of the departments. We then identify them and work w