Thank you.
I guess I should start by saying that the Auditor General of Canada is the external auditor of government. The Comptroller General is, if you will, the person who sets the policies and the procedures and who has the oversight role for the internal audit. He has actually been working very actively to try to strengthen that function within government. Internal audit is really a function for the management. It's a way for management to ensure that systems and practices are working as they should within the department and to provide that information to senior management.
One of the difficulties we have noted, and that I think you will note regarding many of the high-profile audits that we have done in the past few years, is that there were internal audits that identified those problems repeatedly in some cases. But the internal audits weren't taken seriously enough and corrective action wasn't taken. So the introduction of an audit committee with external people, hopefully, will bring a little more rigour into the system and will help the deputy minister, or the heads of the agencies, in addressing some of the management problems. It is our hope that if those are addressed then the external auditor won't be reporting on them.
So there can be very good collaboration between internal audit and external audit. We want to make sure that our work is coordinated, that we're not looking at the same things, if possible. The external auditor will rely on the work of the internal auditor. We work very closely with the Comptroller General obviously on a lot these issues because we have the same objective, which is to improve management within government. We have different roles, but we are all trying to get to the same place.