It wasn't driven mostly by our resources. Our principal issue or concern was the level of audit activity we were doing on crown corporations when you compared it, for example, to departments and agencies. We issue an opinion each year on the financial statements of these crown corporations, so we're in there every year doing the financial audit, and then these special examinations require us to give an opinion of the corporation as a whole.
It requires a considerable amount of audit effort to do that once every five years when you compare it to government departments. For the Department of National Defence, if I can just pick an example, we do an audit of the department's financial statements each year and we have a long-term audit plan for auditing the Department of National Defence, but we can't even cover the whole corporation over 10 years. We look at it in bits and pieces. We can't cover the whole Department of National Defence over 10 years.
So our principal issue was the relative level of audit attention the crown corporations were getting compared to departments. We're doing an awful lot of audit work in crown corporations and relatively little in departments. As for our suggestion, especially because we've been doing these special examinations since 1984 and many of the corporations get clean opinions where we do not signal a significant deficiency, we raised the question not only of whether this is the best use of our resources in continuing to audit these corporations, but also of the impact that has on the corporations themselves. As I'm sure you can appreciate, auditing an organization puts a significant burden on the management of the corporation as well.
For all those reasons, we supported the government's amendment to the legislation.