Public Accounts committee  Yes, that's right. Under the citizenship legislation, our officers currently do not have the authority to seize a suspicious document. Bill C-6, which is before Parliament, actually includes that authority now. If that were to be approved, then our officers could do so. Under

Public Accounts committee  In terms of any of the changes that have been made, I think the Auditor General has pointed out the extent to which the documentation on the files has perhaps not described all of this. But any of the changes that have taken place, in terms of risk indicators and risk criteria, a

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we've been operating under an understanding with both of the security agencies. It has become apparent that there needs to be greater clarity and that we need to be more explicit in terms of our requirements and what our processes are for the exchange of information, a

Public Accounts committee  Our commitment on the management action plan, both from my department and the agencies, is that we will have it in place by December. Work has already been taking place, but we will have finalized that in terms of the clarity by December.

Public Accounts committee  Mr.—

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I can ask my colleagues at CBSA and the RCMP to respond further, but certainly as soon as we have an application and we enter the information into our global case management system, it is then referred to the agencies and we are able to receive criminal security cleara

Public Accounts committee  Perhaps I can start and ask Mr. Orr to fill in the details. When individuals submit their paper applications, those are then sent to our case processing centre, located in Sydney, and the information is inputted into our global case management system. This is where we try to enh

Public Accounts committee  As I say, we certainly use risk triage criteria at the front end—and we're actually doing more work in looking at our risk indicators up front—to try to make sure that we can identify lower risk, more routine cases where there may be not issues versus complex cases, so they're ar

Public Accounts committee  Perhaps I can clarify that, Mr. Chair. In terms of the current process of conducting criminal clearance processes, we do send information to our global case management system, which is a protected system. We send it to the RCMP, and the CBSA also has access to it. Basically, we

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, no system is perfect and I think it would have been surprising to me if there hadn't been issues identified. That's the role of the Auditor General. As they say, every program always needs to look at itself in terms of ways to make improvements. Certainly, measures we

Public Accounts committee  The undertaking that we have done clearly recognizes that we need to do better. We need to do more, and we need to improve our processes.

Public Accounts committee  We have an action plan in place. We have been putting in measures for fraud detection and fraud control. Clearly, we need to do better. We need to improve the work we're doing. We have put in place a systematic, evidence-based approach to identifying and managing risk. It include

Public Accounts committee  I'll begin by saying that we have always done criminal security checks in our immigration clearance checks. Certainly, as part of the citizenship process, there are issues in the timeliness of the information we receive. We're working to improve our processes with the RCMP and wi

Public Accounts committee  On the issue of risk analysis, our risk criteria were based on very extensive work that we have done from getting feedback from the RCMP, CBSA, and from our own officers, who supplied information gleaned from refusals and revocations. We have looked at that. We also have done ext

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we are well on our way in implementing the action plan. The dates are indicated, certainly, as I mentioned already. We have already updated our guidance. We have significantly strengthened and enhanced our guidance, our operational directions to staff. There is other