Government Operations committee  I would say yes in one case and no in one case. We certainly were beating the drum, in the sense that once you have your budget and your audited financial statements on the accrual basis, we feel it makes sense for your departmental accounting to be on the same basis of accountin

Government Operations committee  It was essentially, “The accounting we have now works well. We're able to make decisions with it. We're very busy. This is going to take time away from doing the business of government, from serving the taxpayers of this great province.”

Government Operations committee  It was a bit easier to sell, because the accounting systems that we had in place.... I mean, the decision had been made to go accrual, and going accrual in the estimates appropriation wasn't that big a challenge in Ontario. It was getting all the departments to go to full-blown a

Government Operations committee  When I read some of the literature, the U.S. has decided not to go. They're very concerned about losing the front-end control on the cash basis, on the appropriation basis. That's my sense of why they decided not to go that way; they don't feel there's a big enough advantage. A l

Government Operations committee  A key fiscal accountability measure is the budget deficit surplus, and the government comes out and says, “Here's our target”, at the start of the year. At the end of the year, you have an audit and you come out with a different number, and to some extent the public looks at that

Government Operations committee  It's very important to get the people from the departments--the senior people, perhaps at the ADM level--sitting around a table like this and actually talking about it. Then you have to make it very clear that the decision has been made and you're going ahead. But at that point I

Government Operations committee  To some extent I think you're getting at a systems-based question. I just don't know enough about your systems right now, whether you have fairly sophisticated ERP systems, where you have some departments using Oracle and some using SAP—maybe it's a matter that you already have a

Government Operations committee  From a materials perspective, I know—I was an ADM involved somewhat in the early stages—that the difficult part was getting the departments onside. There was a tremendous resistance: “I've been using Walker”, or “I've been using GEAC”, or “I'm content with my system”, or “Oh, her

Government Operations committee  I guess I'll keep my Auditor General's hat on. What you're talking about is when four to six weeks before the end of the year you see a lot of computer trucks drive up to the door, and you get off the elevator and there are computers piled wall to wall because people are spendi

Government Operations committee  If I could jump in, I think the RFP was issued around 2000, and there were three main ERP vendors that they were considering. They put together a special office, a central office with an ADM in charge, to run the implementation across all the ministries and stage the various mini

Government Operations committee  When you're inputting an ERP system, you want to re-engineer a lot of your business processes. You're putting in an accounting system that's going to be covering 500 programs. All of these programs have a wish list, but you have to put in a system that doesn't require a lot of cu

Government Operations committee  My understanding, from the systems perspective is, going back seven or eight years ago, that Ontario had clusters of ministries that had different accounting systems. An example would be GIAC. They had five or six ministries that were operating on GIAC and four or five ministries

Government Operations committee  Yes, and they weren't integrated. They weren't even integrable.

Government Operations committee  We're talking about the day-to-day decisions, like whether we should build a new prison. We can build a new prison. We can pay it back in three or four years. You may get a different decision, depending on whether you're looking at it on a cash or accrual basis. Turning to the a

Government Operations committee  I'm Jim McCarter, the Auditor General for Ontario. Because my presentation is fairly high-level, we thought maybe I would lead off. Then I'll turn it to my colleagues. Bruce Bennett is the Controller of Ontario. Arn van Iersel actually has two roles. He's the current Auditor Gene