Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My remarks are very brief. In fact, my colleague is handing out a deck that I'll be referring to as my opening remarks.
Good afternoon everyone.
Thank you for asking me to appear today. I'm here with Layla Michaud, my acting assistant commissioner and chief financial officer.
Mr. Chair, I'm here to ask you to approve a request for additional funding, which was included in supplementary estimates (B) tabled on November 3.
To assist the committee in makings its decision this afternoon, I've prepared a series of slides on the Office of the Information Commissioner’s complaint inventory reduction strategy. These slides explain the objective of the strategy, the purpose of requesting additional funding, how this strategy will be implemented, and the intended results.
If you would be so kind as to turn to the first slide in the short deck that I've provided you, essentially you'll see that the request for additional funding was made to the Treasury Board, and the purpose is strictly to reduce the inventory of complaints at the OIC. The Treasury Board supported the request for additional funds for one year. The funding that is being requested is for fiscal year 2016-17, and it is really a fit-gap measure that was put in place pending the possible introduction and passage of amendments to the Access to Information Act.
The funding that has been awarded, or that is subject to approval today, is strictly to be allocated to investigations. The objective is very specific: we have been required to complete 2,361 complaints. This is a very precise number, and the number is really based on our historical performance in terms of how many complaints we handle per individual, per investigator, and so on. That's why the number is very specific.
We started the inventory with 3,000 complaints, just slightly over that. We are expecting to receive close to 2,000 new complaints this year, based on our current projections, and we have three-quarters of the year done. With the augmented investigative capacity with the additional funding, we would close over 2,000 files, and that would leave a remainder of about 2,600, so that's essentially a reduction of about 500 complaints. If the funding is not approved, then the inventory will increase to over 3,600 complaints.
What we have done so far, Mr. Chair, is cash-manage, essentially, pending the decision of this committee. We have hired a mix of full-time employees and consultants, and we have provided comprehensive training to these FTEs. We have managed to secure some additional space for these additional people with the goodwill of Elections Canada, which is housed in the same office as we are. That's also a temporary measure, but we're not paying for this office space at this time, thanks to Elections Canada. Part of the funding was to upgrade the IT network to service the additional people.
As for what we are doing in terms of monitoring the results, we have very fixed closure targets every month, which we follow. I meet with my senior team basically every week. We also review the results on a monthly basis at the executive committee, which is composed mostly of our directors of investigations. We also submit the results of our progress to our audit and evaluation committee. By the way, a representative of the Auditor General also sits on our audit committee on a regular basis, so they're also apprised of this. That's relevant because, should the funding be approved, the Auditor General will also review how the money has been spent and allocated.
If you look to the last slide with a graphic, I included the graph because, as you can see, in red, it basically shows the performance we've managed to achieve so far in anticipation of this funding's being rolled out for the entire fiscal year. You can see the difference that a few additional people have made in our closure rate.
The next steps, really, are the approval or not by this committee of the supplementary (B)s. We will be reporting on the results of this initiative to this committee and to Parliament via our annual report or, obviously, at any time that this committee would like us to report.
Thank you again, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to explain what is happening in terms of the funding requested in the supplementary estimates (B), which must be voted on.
We're ready to answer your questions.