First, I'm an accounting officer under the Federal Accountability Act. I take very seriously my obligations to this committee and to Parliament to be accountable for the financial management of the department and management issues and to be transparent and open about that. If there had been a $50-million problem, Parliament would have heard about it. We're operating a $1-billion budget, give or take; about $570 million of that is operating, and about 80% of that at least is salaries.
When it became a $2-million problem heading toward a $1-million problem, heading toward a $500,000 problem, it was viewed as not material. Let me be clear. The comptroller general says that sets the rules in terms of materiality. What's material in reporting to Parliament is a completely different question of whether or not people who have leave discrepancies that really need to be fixed should fix them. It was always our intention, and continues to be our intention, to ensure that as much of that as possible will be done.
At that stage, it was not viewed as an important matter to bring to Parliament. The unfortunate part is that what's been reported is an initial estimate based on an initial set of discrepancies that we knew didn't at all represent the truth. Through extensive work by lots of people throughout the department, to some grief I might say, I show up and say to the employees who do this that they're going to go back to 2007 and look through their old calendars and their old files and their old records and try to figure out all this. They don't thank us very much, and say that's a wonderful bit of news. They go through all that effort. They reconcile what's required one way or the other, and it comes down to less than $2 million.
Perhaps I should have brought more information to Parliament at the time, but when we got to filing the report officially, the advice that we had and our judgment was it had become such a small amount that we should note there had been an issue, but it wasn't necessary to go into the full explanation.
In some ways now, I wonder whether I should have had the full explanation so it was on the record and wasn't susceptible to being reported. As I say, the moment it came to my attention, I wasn't willing to take the chance that Justice employees would be accused of having somehow defrauded Canadians of $45 million of pay. That's why we did the exercise, notwithstanding the exercise, that seems to have been the impression that was left. There was a notation on our financial records, admittedly an opaque notation, that indicated it. We had worked with the comptroller general throughout this to make sure that we were complying with the rules as the system understands it.
Today we have a certain number of unfilled positions, and therefore, we will not likely spend all the salary dollars that were appropriated to us. From year to year in a $570-million budget, there will always be some slippage in how much of our salary dollars we're spending. We're allowed to carry forward some of that money. When we got to an amount of $2 million or less, it's really in that zone that I have people on maternity leave or hiring replacements. There will be a two-month gap. I won't spend all that salary dollar. We'll carry it forward to next year.
I wouldn't want to give you that figure today, because it's a very hard thing to capture on a day-to-day basis, but at any one time, there's a certain amount of flexibility on how we're spending our money. But I would assure you that had there been a significant amount, I would have been reporting it.