I can begin by saying that the mandate of the Government Accountability Office of the U.S. and the Auditor General of Canada are very different. The GAO in the U.S. does work conducted on behalf of Congress, and 90% or more of their work is directed by Congress. In some ways, I think you could say they're almost like a research branch for Congress. So they provide information that Congress asks of them, whereas under the Auditor General Act it is the Auditor General who decides what audits to do. Obviously, we take requests from parliamentary committees into consideration, but we are not required to do the audits that parliamentary committees will ask us to do.
We base all our work on the standards for audit and insurance that govern auditors in Canada and are in fact even part of the international standards. It is very clear in those standards that there are two standards that affect how we deal with policy. One is what is called self-review: you can't conduct work and then audit it because you would be in a conflict. The other is what is called the advocacy threat: that you cannot advocate a policy or a principle and then audit it. So we follow those standards very rigorously, and I think they have served us very well. And that is why we are credible in our work: we are seen as being objective as to the policy. We obviously audit the implementation, and I think it's true to say that at times when you see very poor implementation it can call the policy into question, but we would not as an office comment on the policy itself.