I think, Mr. Chair, there's perhaps a more fundamental difference. It's something that people aren't always particularly aware of in our office.
We tend to be known for the performance audits that we issue. Those are the audits that get the most attention and scrutiny, and those are audits that look at how government departments are operating certain programs.
Private sector audits tend to be similar to our financial statement audits. For the most part, you go in and look at a set of financial statements, look at all of the underlying information, and express an opinion on the fairness of that set of financial statements. In fact, our process for doing financial statement audits is essentially exactly the same as what a private sector firm would do. For the most part we are issuing clean audit opinions, audit opinions which say that the financial statements are presented fairly. Whenever we are presenting something that says something is presented fairly, people don't tend to have as much interest in it as when we are presenting something that says there are problems that need to be fixed.
Half of our business is doing financial statement audits. Our role would be very similar to the role of a private sector auditor and our relationship with our clients would be very similar to their relationship. But people tend to focus on our performance audit work, and that's why people see us perhaps as an organization that brings forward issues and see that particular difference between us and private sector auditors.