Again, that wasn't where we were looking in terms of the audit. There are a number of services they provide that people have access to and, certainly, we did find that in the course of the year about 300,000 people, I think it was, had accessed these services. The population that would be eligible for the services would be significantly higher than that 300,000. That indicates there's work for the department to do to understand who is getting access to the services.
Again, we did find that they made some changes from time to time on the services that were available, and there were some communication issues that we identified. For example, if the department made a decision to change the services they pay for, they didn't communicate that right away. Their reason for this was that when they made this type of change they had to program it into their system, their payment system, and that took a while to do.
In our report, we identified an example where they made a change in 2014. I think it was about the number of X-rays, for example, that they would pay for. They increased it from six to 10, but it took them two years to actually tell people that they had increased it from six to 10. In the meantime, somebody may have heard from their dental service provider that they had already had their six X-rays and couldn't have any more, so then they might have put something off, whereas another dental provider might have said, “Okay, I think you need another X-ray, so I'll ask for approval.” They then would get approval because the department had already increased from six to 10 but hadn't actually communicated it.
In that case, the access to those types of services might have been uneven because either some dental service providers knew about it or some asked for pre-approval, whereas others didn't know about it or didn't ask for the pre-approval.