I'm sorry to keep sounding like an accountant, but I am one, after all.
I think fundamentally the starting point has to be an agreement, as I said earlier, on how you define the entity—so what the government is—and then how you account for things. On those two things there are recommendations by the Public Sector Accounting Board on how that's done, and the federal government follows those recommendations in preparing its actual financial statements.
In order to be able to compare actual performance with budgeted or predicted performance, it's therefore important that all of the budget documents, including the estimates, be prepared on the same basis. That's the only way at the end that you will be able to know whether the government met its plan or not. So it's about making sure those are lined up.
The other thing that's important in terms of the whole appropriations process—again, I'm not exactly sure how you do this at the federal level—is to make sure that what is being voted on is clear. If there's an amount being voted, it needs to be clear to Parliament what it is actually voting that money for and what it's to be used for. That would be the other side of it.