The expenditure management system, which is under the control of the Treasury Board Secretariat, was established to ensure that the spending by programs provides value for money. Because of that, there is a system in place that each department and agency has to provide indicators for the performance of their programs and then at the end of the year they have to assess to what extent they have achieved those objectives.
What we did in our report was look at over a three fiscal-year period the performance of all those programs, their objectives and what they showed they achieved at the end of the year, and then we tried to match that with the changes in the budget allocation for those programs. The idea was to see whether the expenditure management system and the performance measures are actually used for allocating funds to different programs.
What we found was there was no real correlation between the performance of the programs and the budget allocations, budget cuts or increases, in the following year.