I'm often asked this question as well.
The difficulty there is that one of the final steps a public servant should do is to certify, before saying to go ahead and make the payment, that the goods or services were received. We saw consistently that public servants were certifying that; what we were looking for was proof.
For example, 94% of the contracts we looked at required time sheets in order to demonstrate that a contractor had done work. We found that those were very rarely there. In almost 60% of the cases, there was little to no evidence of that. In fact, in one contract, there was only one contractor out of 25 who had a time sheet. That doesn't mean the work wasn't done; it means there's no ability to demonstrate to Canadians that you received value for money.
That's a big gap and a big hole that shouldn't be there. It's not as easy as saying that because you didn't have a time sheet, nothing was done, and you should go recover the money; it's about knowing whether or not the work was done.