He plays a very useful role in advising the deputy minister and me on particular issues that might come to our attention. Whether they're related to personnel or to particular files, he'll investigate and advise us as to whether they've been managed appropriately.
In addition to the ethics program, he's got ethics officers in each branch in each region, who shore up the whole organization. But not only that, he's working on reinforcing our regime of internal control. For example, if we take our acquisitions branch, highly complex processes that are used for procurement—some would say too complex—he's helping the branch head as a very important adviser to identify the key control points in those procurement processes and how we reinforce those control points without adding to the process burden we've already got. Ideally, we should end up with very tight control points, very definite accountability, knowing who's responsible for signing off on what documents, thereby allowing us to clear away some of the underbrush that can often accumulate.
Currently we have a risk officer who comes with an audit background and is very experienced in that regard, and who is invaluable to our organization in showing up those processes and making sure we've got good, as they call it, quality assurance.