We think these pilots are extremely important because of the principle at play here. We undertook a review of all capital assets across government in the past couple of years. The number one recommendation that came out of departments had to do with the barrier that departments face at the end of the fiscal year, in that you either spend the money or lose it; it lapses. So they asked us if we could do anything to try to fix that.
Fixing it, of course, is a little more difficult than just proposing it, because there are legalities involved here. We are talking about the Financial Administration Act and ministerial responsibilities. So with the concurrence of our colleagues in the Department of Finance--because this would have significant influence in moving money from one year to another--we've identified three individual departments that have representative large capital assets, and they are in good standing with us. They have long-term capital plans in place that we think are achievable.
On that basis, we will provide them with the authority to not have to worry about the end of the fiscal year, so they don't have to make what we call suboptimal decisions. If they are renovating a building or buying a piece of capital equipment and something happens to the contract very late in March, right now they're stuck. They lapse the money for a very useful thing, only to have the invoice show up in April. Then they have to rejig their budget.
So it creates a tremendous amount of consternation within departments to try to manage that. Individual managers have told me that they have two or three individuals who, from January to the end of March, do nothing but look at contracts and make sure deliveries are being made so they don't lapse them.
I think this is a very important principle. We support the pilot and will be recommending it to ministers within the next couple of weeks. We hope to get the results of that. We think we'll have significant results within the first year of operation. Our plan is to try to expand that to all departments because of the factors that Madam Fraser alluded to earlier with this artificial barrier at the end of the fiscal year.