I guess Treasury Board Secretariat would have to answer that, but I can give you some thoughts on it.
Fundamentally it needs to come down to parliamentarians understanding what they are voting on when they are voting on an accrual basis rather than a cash basis. I think it also comes down to the Treasury Board Secretariat and the government having appropriate ways to control what is being voted, when it's voted on an accrual basis.
For example, departments will get a capital budget. Capital expenditures do not affect the bottom line surplus or deficit. It's buying an asset. What affects the bottom line surplus or deficit is the amount of amortization that is recorded in a given year and how much a particular asset depreciates in that year. In the budget process, there would have to be both. There has to be approval to acquire the capital asset, so that's essentially a cash transaction. It's not exactly, but essentially it's an approval to acquire the asset, but also it's an estimate or an appropriation to approve the recording of the amortization. You wouldn't want a department to record less amortization, for whatever reason, and use the excess of that amortization appropriation to spend on something else.
I think there are some types of accrual expenditures, like amortization and some other types of expenditures, that would need to be protected so that departments couldn't spend it on something else. I think Treasury Board Secretariat is wrestling with those types of issues.
You can also run into issues with pension accounting where because of the way the expense is recorded in pensions, it's based on a lot of assumptions, a lot of assumptions about future events, and trying to establish what's the value of the pension benefits earned in that year. That may be different than the amount of cash that has to go into the pension plan in that year. On an accrual basis, the estimate may show one thing for pension expense, but the amount of cash that needs to be paid into the pension plan may be different. It may be higher than the pension expense, probably not right now, but in some cases that can happen, and I've seen that happen in my experience in New Brunswick.
There are some things like that which people need to be aware of in terms of the differences between accrual and cash accounting. In my opinion, doing the estimates on an accrual basis is preferable, but people need to understand what those differences are.