As we note in the audit, we looked for evidence that the senior committees at National Defence were actually discussing and were monitoring the financial management of the department. We found very limited discussion in those senior committee meetings about financial management. One of the findings of the audit is that we really think they should be spending more time on that.
I am and I think we all are aware that they have a lot of other priorities and a lot of other things going on. But with the size of the budget and the complexity of the operations they have to manage, we would have expected to see more discussion at a strategic level. As well, we found that some of the key documents and some of the key pieces of information—for example, the corporate business plan, the integration of risks, and analysis of those risks across the organization—were not in place. There are a number of plans and a number of risk identifications at an operational level, but it all needs to be brought up to a corporate or department-wide level.
One example of key risks that we mentioned in the report is that there are a number of plans done for which there's no assessment around some of the risks to those plans. A major one in all of this is capacity. It's all very well to be planning at an operational level, but does the department as a whole have a capacity to do all of these things? That's the kind of discussion we would have expected to see at a senior level.