That's a great question. I hope I can enlighten the committee a bit.
We never had the authority to put in contracts. We never had the authority to put the TAs in place. We had what was called a “technical” authority. We could sign off on the scope of the task.
I also want to mention that we are not the finance group, so we don't have responsibility for invoicing, reconciliation, the overall financial system or the system of record. That would all be within the CFO group within the procurement team and within the finance branch. We were responsible for the technical delivery and execution.
We did have managers who oversaw the consultants who worked on ArriveCAN. They would have been responsible for signing off on the time sheets of the consultants. I believe they were all done in order. What would happen after that is the time sheets would go to the vendor. The vendor would reconcile them and submit an invoice. Once all the paperwork was submitted and it was in the proper format, I was asked to sign. Then it would go to finance to sign off. They would do the last verification to make sure that all of the tasks and all of the procedures were followed in order to sign off.