Thank you, Mr. Auditor General.
Just as the Auditor General indicated, in order to try to answer this question I have to relate back to the audits we did in 2012 on both institutions, keeping in mind that those were audits of the administration and not necessarily the governance regime of both chambers. It's very clear in those audits that we didn't audit the Board of Internal Economy in the case of the House, or the Standing Committee on Internal Economy in the case of the Senate.
That said, we did have an opportunity to interact with how the administration plays its role in the oversight of expenditures, and what other types of bodies are present. That may be able to help in that regard.
My perception on that would be that there are a lot of similarities, perhaps more than there are differences. In thinking about that type of question earlier this morning, one of the big issues I recall from those two particular audits was the nature of documentation that was present in the case of the Senate with respect to our being able to determine whether or not the expenses were incurred for the purposes intended.
If you go back to the two different reports, we provided tables in those documents about the percentage of compliance with regard to our ability to determine whether or not those expenses met their intended purposes. That's largely for purposes of the role of members, in the case of this chamber, and in the case of senators in the case of the red chamber.
The difference is that when we did that audit, in about 98.5% of the transactions we looked at we were able to conclude that they met that condition. In the case of the Senate, it dropped down to about 94.8%. That had a lot to do with the way in which documentation was kept vis-à-vis the role of the administration and individual senators, an issue that we didn't really encounter here.
As it relates to policies and procedures, at a very macro level there were quite a bit of similarities and what you would expect to see in terms of proper authorization, proper documentation being required, proper approvals being necessary, and reviews by the administration. In both cases I think we got lots of comments that many members and many senators felt they were under a lot of scrutiny by the administration on how the expenses were being incurred. Yet we still found instances where the documentation was not sufficient in both cases, but we had a bigger struggle with that in the case of the Senate administration, which is why we made very specific recommendations in that report about that subject.
Both groups have a committee. Here, the Board of Internal Economy, and there it's the Standing Committee on Internal Economy. At a macro level there are a lot of similarities in terms of the expectations, roles, and responsibilities of both of those organizations from a governance perspective. We looked at the roles of internal audit as being important in providing some kind of oversight to assist the particular boards, and we made recommendations in both cases.
I hope that helps a little bit in giving you some clarity on those. But I would say that at a macro level they're very similar in the details, and a little bit of a difference that was sufficient for the nature of the recommendations we made.