I have a few ideas based on what happened here. Part of it might be document control. The department retains control of these documents. I think the documents should be taken from the evaluation team and given to a trusted third party. At some point, certainly at contract award, they should be immediately available to anybody who wants them--I mean, that's transparency--as opposed to their doing an ATIP and waiting a year or two to get them. I think that's a simple thing that would help.
I actually believe the acquisitions branch should be separate from Public Works. The basic structure in most of government is that the acquisitions branch works at arm's length. It's supposed to ensure that the process is followed. In the case of Public Works, of course, it's all in the same department. They all report to the same people. It's one ADM talking to another. To me, that is not a good structure. Perhaps the acquisitions branch should be a separate department and report to a separate minister.
To me, there's another fairly simple thing that could be done. I actually believe you need some level of personal accountability for what happens, kind of like Sarbanes-Oxley in the U.S., so that the senior people are accountable for what happens in the organization no matter what. Perhaps a model like that would help.
I think some kind of audit mechanism of these scores would be important. When you see these documents, it's a bit mind-boggling; they're just photocopies of handwritten pages with numbers scratched out. Frankly, in our case there are some high numbers scratched out and lower numbers written in--in what appears to be different handwriting. You think, this is worth $400 million? It's not a very good mechanism for managing this kind of money. If you were transferring $400 million in a bank, you'd have a computer audit trail and so on. And that would be easy to implement.
Those are some ideas, I think.