We are pursuing this because of the interest expressed at this committee, and also the interest expressed on the part of the President of the Treasury Board.
The last time I was here, I was asked if I had seen any of these other irregularities. In that short term, for some of the things we looked at, we had not seen anything that really struck us. But following the question, we decided the wise thing to do was to go back much further, so that's what we are intending to do.
The first step of what we have to do is look at the statistics, and our source of information is the pay records, because we can trace from the pay records whether somebody worked as exempt staff and went into the public service, and went from the public service to the exempt staff. We can identify those patterns.
I have to remember we're talking over a fairly long period of time. We're talking about a number of people who were in exempt staff positions, a fair number who moved back and forth. That's not to say all of these are a problem, because there is a value and there is a role in our system for public servants to be working as exempt staff and then coming back into the public service. We have always been worried that this was not monitored and not regulated.
Our first step is to look at the numbers--our databases--and identify those patterns we feel look irregular, or look odd. What I mean by that is that a movement in and out for a short term is not one that gives me a particular concern. Lots of movement back and forth begins to look a little worrisome. Movements across long periods of time, one exempt staff...it's the different patterns we're going to isolate. That work has started, we are doing that now. I need to know how many of these positions I see are at risk.
The other thing we intend to do is go back as far as our records possibly can, so we will go back to 1990. If we can go back further, we will. We want to make sure we get a good period of time and get a number of transitions, because most of this activity occurs over transition, so we want a number of transitions. We expect to have that information, that first analysis of what numbers we're talking about, in January, so we would have a handle on what numbers we're dealing with.
Then what we propose to do is throw that into full audit mode. The auditors would identify individual cases that might present problems, like the two we had reported in the last annual report, and investigate those--those individual investigations.
That's our approach. Our first step is in January, and by the time I see the size of what I am dealing with, then I'll be in a better position to say how long the rest of it would take.