Public Accounts committee  We know that.

Public Accounts committee  The local offices all now have business continuity plans. As an example, the Harry Hays Building in Calgary was recently shut down. We were able to divert services to Calgary and Edmonton because we had a particular problem there. When we have localized increases in volume, yes, we have plans in place.

Public Accounts committee  It depends on what the clinic does, quite frankly. To be honest with you, if you're signing masses as guarantor, that's somewhat difficult for us. If you conduct a clinic in conjunction with us, where we can vet and verify that the documents are correct and it's just a matter of getting that information into our issuing system, having the security alerts run, and a passport printed, then that's very useful, but if you show up on our doorstep with 1,000 applications and we haven't been able to prepare for it, not particularly.

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  It would be quicker in that there is less chance of the application being rejected, and the benefit to the applicants is that they would be able to retain their birth certificate or their citizenship certificate.

Public Accounts committee  It's an enormous problem. In mail-in applications from the United States right now, about 40% of the applications are being rejected because of problems with the documentation, the form, or the photos. Domestically, it's slightly less, but not much; 25% to 30% of mail-in applications are currently rejected.

Public Accounts committee  Right. We're putting together a plan now for clinics across the country with agencies that have requested that we do that—for example, the duty free shop in Sarnia, or with various members of Parliament who have asked that we conduct them. You can contact us for our availability to do that.

Public Accounts committee  A worldwide problem is that as the documents themselves become more secure and are more difficult to replicate or tamper with, internal fraud becomes the biggest problem. We have significant controls in our organization to prevent and catch internal fraud—

Public Accounts committee  Employees.

Public Accounts committee  There are two distinct issues. First, people with access to the issuing system or with access to blank passports—our secure assets—have all been cleared to secret. There is 100% verification on that element of it. The second element—the passwords within the system and user access accounts within the system—is the issue I addressed previously in saying that we're putting in an automatic system.

Public Accounts committee  I don't see our watch list growing to the same extent, because any information we get would be in a different format. What we received was a download of information on people who are currently incarcerated and should not be able to apply for a passport. That changes every day. We have a data exchange with Correctional Service Canada.

Public Accounts committee  The minister announced that 500 employees were being hired, and we did a massive hiring to try to get the applications that were sitting in backlog in envelopes into the issuing system, opened, screened, so that if people at least hadn't filled out an application correctly, they could get the information back.

Public Accounts committee  It's absolutely true. Certainly when you issue a passport and change the design and it's a ten-year passport, you have ten years before that particular style of document is off the market. As we introduce new security features, they're replicated by people we wouldn't want doing that.

Public Accounts committee  Our issuing system is antiquated. The kinds of controls the Auditor General was looking for don't exist in the system. We had to put in a number of manual controls, which were a band-aid. That was admitted to the Auditor General and her team when they came. In the interim, our IT team has been designing automated controls for monthly reviews and deleting old access accounts to ensure that people don't have multiple accounts.