Mr. Chairman, I thank the member for the question.
Let me clarify a couple of things. Obviously EDC was not involved in the negotiation on the agreement. That was handled by the government directly with the U.S. government. We were asked to develop and implement a process such that once the agreement had come into effect, rather than exporters having to wait what was estimated potentially to take up to two years for the U.S. government to actually liquidate the duty refunds, it would allow for those moneys to flow to exporters much faster. Our involvement was merely to develop and implement that process. It was voluntary as to whether companies chose to participate in it or not, and that was their assessment as to whether they felt that they were better off waiting for the refund from the U.S. government as opposed to following the process that EDC provided.
About half of the overall eligible recipients participated in the program. Of the total $5 billion, roughly, of rebates, $3.1 billion is what I said was the amount that was liquidated by EDC through the 829 participants in the program. All of those liquidations have taken place now. Actually, all but one of them were completed by the end of the year. The vast majority of them were completed within the first four weeks of the program.
We have now completed the program. We are also in the process of completing an audit. The Auditor General will, in conjunction with its normal Canada Account audit, audit the process to ensure that it met all the requirements and conformed to all the processes. So it is now complete.