Thank you very much, Cathy, and I appreciate the question.
You're right. Through an access to information release that was analyzed by The Globe and Mail, they found some discrepancies between the reported number of temporary foreign workers on particular work sites and the actual number. We've done a very close analysis.
In fact we've gone back and looked at every single file exhaustively and we found that my department made errors in 105 cases. That was 4.1%. Those errors were because 21 employers should no longer be on the list as they no longer have temporary foreign workers. They did in the past, but no longer do. Seventeen employers on the list should have been in the 30% to 50% range of TFWs rather than over 50%. Ten employers should be below 30%. Fifty-seven employers were unaffected by the input errors and should remain on the original list as they appear.
In most cases the errors were actually made by the employers who submitted inaccurate information on their online application that went straight into our system. I can tell you that the incidence of error in our department was very low. It was fractional. We've learned from that to make sure that is not repeated and we will now be verifying the information submitted by employers to make sure that we don't accept erroneous information from them.
Overall I can tell you that these minor administrative errors in 4% of cases do not affect the overall assessment that we made of the program. I want to completely allay anyone's concerns that there was a huge lack of integrity in the data. That is not accurate. The errors were very minor in nature in a very small number of cases, 4% on our part. In any event grosso modo the analysis that we did about the percentage of TFWs and work sites remains completely as it was when we presented it in June.