Mr. Chair, a small digression.
I mentioned earlier that we have not set goals, that we need to set goals, and that we're working on setting goals. But the department chose, over the past four years, to fix the process by which SINs were issued to make sure all future SINs after 2002 had it; we were sure of their integrity. So that was a management decision.
We think we're doing all the right things to maintain and improve the integrity of the SIR, including pursuing those vital events agreements. As far as setting goals goes, it would be tempting--and we've looked at other jurisdictions like the United States, for example, the social security administration—to pick a number like 99%, or 99.5%, and even then on a database as large as the SIR, you would be talking about an awful lot of inaccurate fields, even at 0.5%.
But we need to understand first what an error really means. Does it matter that for my birthday, say, the numbers are transposed in the SIR if no federal government program operates on day but rather month and year, for example? We need to understand better how the information is used, what a critical error is, and a far less critical error, and then set our goals for accuracy based on that. We are in the midst of that study right now, and we will have goals set by this fall.