My understanding, from the systems perspective is, going back seven or eight years ago, that Ontario had clusters of ministries that had different accounting systems. An example would be GIAC. They had five or six ministries that were operating on GIAC and four or five ministries that operated on something else.
There were two problems. None of these systems could talk to each other. They weren't integrated, so for the centre to get information was very difficult and very time consuming. As well, my understanding was that these systems were cash-based systems. They could not readily handle accrual accounting. To address those two problems, the government basically--and again this is something we weren't on the bleeding edge or even on the leading edge of--there were a lot of what are called ERP systems, like Oracle SAP R/3, which are enterprise systems, which large private sector, worldwide global organizations are putting in place because they do allow an enterprise-wide accounting. So because that was already being done by a number of organizations and in some governments, the Ontario government said, “We can't work with these cluster systems. First of all, we need better information enterprise-wide, and if we're going to go to the accrual accounting basis, this would allow us to do it.”
I was an ADM at Treasury Board at that time. My understanding was that they put an RFP out and decided to go to Oracle for two reasons. However, my understanding is that at the federal level, even though you have several systems, I think they're of a much higher grade and may already actually be ERP systems. So these systems may actually be able to do accrual accounting, and they also may be linked together. I'm just not sure of the status of your systems.
So I think it may not be quite an apples to oranges comparison, federal versus provincial. We really had to do something because GIAC and these old systems just could not handle accrual accounting.