I look at regulatory burden from two perspectives: what are our direct costs, and what are the compliance costs we impose on institutions? Broadly speaking, I think we continue to look for and take action on both sides.
Our direct costs, which we charge back to institutions, are $4 million or $5 million per large institution, which is not a large amount, quite frankly, but we continue to look for ways to keep those under control. It's one of the reasons they rose only 1% from 2005-06 to 2006-07 in the main estimates, because we cut out a bunch of heads, re-engineered some processes, and kept the costs down.
Going forward this coming year, we will not impose any additional costs on the property and casualty industry--and we've told them that--because we've again cut back on our efforts there because the situation has dramatically improved.
With respect to compliance costs, we maintain a very open dialogue with the regulated institutions, and we're looking for initiatives on a regular basis to try to keep compliance costs under control. Over the past couple of years, the biggest initiative has been rationalizing our data requests. As far as data is concerned, I like to say it's like a bush in the garden: if you never prune it, it just does this, because the natural inclination of a regulator is to ask for more.
Starting three years ago, we progressively went through our data requests as we were arranging our processes, and we cut the data requests to the insurance industry by roughly 30%. We are in the process of doing that now for the banking industry. They asked that we defer it by about 18 months because they had other IT initiatives going on. We'll come back to it in about another six or eight months, and I anticipate we'll have a similar kind of cutback. We'll also look at rationalizing how we get data in a more efficient kind of way. So that cuts down compliance costs. There are a range of those kinds of things we can keep doing.