Yes, thank you.
There was no backlog when the board of referees and umpires.... There were a few cases the umpires were deliberating on to finish, and the board of referees' cases that were passed over were essentially those that were awaiting a ruling by CRA. All the work had been done up to date in order to pass it over to the SST, so backlogs that have come up have ensued since the SST started.
I had a very important role, along with my counterpart, Commissioner Donnelly, in helping to run the former system. It was actually functioning very well. It had been doing so since about 1940 and had been fine-tuned over the years. The rationale for putting it together with the other appeal systems was, I think, to save money and have it be more effective.
The board of referees was very effective. They heard appeals within a very limited number of days. They rendered decisions that day, and appellants got their answers very quickly. That hasn't been the case with the SST, although some of that has been explained to me as being growing pains, start-up challenges and so forth.
My recommendation is that since it's difficult to unscramble an egg, what we need to do is push for the improvements that the change was supposed to drive toward.