First of all, I want to be clear, having referred to the dates in the action plan, that the department staff have prepared an action plan for each of our recommendations. They said what they would do for each of our recommendations and assigned a date by which each would be done. Some of the dates have gone by, but I don't know whether they have done them because we haven't gone in to audit them. I don't want to leave the impression that I'm saying the department has not done those things. It has an action plan and has put in some dates, some of which are in the past and some of which are coming up. My point was that it would perhaps be something that this committee could consider exploring with the department—for example, what it has done, whether it is still on track, and whether it has met those deadlines.
Again, our role is to make the recommendations. We find the issues in the course of an audit and make the recommendations, and then the department will provide an action plan against that. The first thing we do is to get the departments to actually agree that they need to do something and need to put the recommendations in place. That's a good step. Some of our recommendations certainly are very consistent with what the committee has said.
However, we don't really know what effect those are going to have until we do another follow-up audit. We're not going to try to say how effective all those are going to be. What we know is that the department staff have laid out a plan. I think our audit can be used to sort of assess whether they are staying on track with that plan, and so they should be able to indicate whether there are actual improvements being made because of the steps they are taking. Their action plan would really be the focal point for understanding what they are doing, what they have to do, and whether it is being successful.