Sir, that's an excellent question. The Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer will try to give you the kind of support you need in terms of dealing with some of those questions.
I'd like to make a few points in response to your question. The first is in terms of best practices around estimates in general. And the second point I'd like to come back to is financial management and whether or not we're putting too much emphasis in the government right now on the back end, as you related, as opposed to more on the front end, and how this committee has worked on that. And third, related to the first point, is really just transparency in reporting in general and the work of this committee in the past to improve transparency, and the work it's doing right now on accrual budgeting.
On the first point, in terms of best practices around estimates, I think there are three points. One, the parliamentary budget officer needs to play a role in making sure you understand the information that's there. The information that is there is quite complicated, and it's probably been said many times before this committee that not many people can walk through the federal budget, which is on an accrual budgeting basis, to the estimates, which are on a cash basis, divided into things called program activities and votes that are very horizontal in nature, to the public accounts, which again are also on an accrual basis but look different from the estimate numbers. So we will try to help you go from A to B to C by better packaging information.
Another best practice, which has been established in the OECD, is the capacity for committees like this, which are working with appropriations, to look at big material changes. In some cases those big material changes show up in big numbers like the big transfer numbers. If the government decides to do something significant with respect to a fiscal balance issue in this country, there are big numbers. But also, as you've alluded to, sir, there could be 900% increases on small line items in certain budgets, which could raise certain alarm bells. So providing capacity so that you could see those big material changes in some of those smaller line items is something we would definitely want to look at, which is also a best practice by the OECD.
If I could go to one of the points I made concerning transparency in reporting, the work done by this committee in 2003 really pushed the government to provide more transparent reporting and it changed the whole planning system. Up until that point we had a business approach to the way the estimates were changed, and the government was under a lot of pressure from this committee in the 2003 important move to more program activity, almost a grocery-list approach to the presentation of activities in the estimates. That gives us a lot more transparency in the current system, so it's a big change.
But I think the work of this committee needs to continue to put pressure on the government to provide more transparency around that, because even though we're moving in the right direction, we need to make more progress. And that will get at some of your points, sir, in terms of looking at some of these smaller items and identifying these particular activities so they show up and you know these things exist and are driving change.
Previous comptrollers general have looked at this issue. We spend a lot of money and attention on the Auditor General's reports, which are very much the back end of the whole financial management process. There is the issue of whether or not we should be spending more time and energy on the front end. This committee has looked at those types of issues. When you look at issues like sale-leaseback, you're looking at those issues in almost real time as a government. Making sure we have best practices early on in those processes helps a lot so we prevent those future failures before the Auditor General has to come in and clean up that stuff. So making sure this committee has information on best practices on these new proposals as they come through and as you challenge them is something we'd be very interested in doing, because we think that's good practice.