It's always concerned me that when you have a well-run, well-managed department, where waste and mismanagement are minimal and they have budget surpluses, the way this system of government operates is that it kind of discourages that. Departments that overspend, and that have a lot of waste and mismanagement, can go back and say, “Look, we're running out of money. We need more.”
My own view is that some realism has to come into this picture. But I thank you for your comments on that point.
You're doing more and more of what we call “performance audits”, which I think really determine whether government programs are effective in meeting their mandates. The other type of audit, which a lot of us might be familiar with, would be the financial audits. They get into tracking money and the nuts and bolts of the flow of money. It's generally financial audits that bring out waste, mismanagement, and corruption, if it exists.
There are some critics out there--I'm not one of them, but they are out there--who say that the Auditor General's office should use more of its resources on financial audits rather than performance audits. What would be your response to those critics?