It's hard to make an overall estimate of financial audits because it depends very much on the organization being audited. For example, the cost of auditing the financial statements of a museum is going to be very different from auditing the financial statements of Canada Post, for example, or the Government of Canada, which is a cost of $4 million to $5 million. I think we put around 50,000 hours of work into auditing the financial statements of the government. So it's very specific.
Because it is an annual exercise, we are able to have efficiencies by the knowledge of the entity, by relying on systems, by documenting. We don't always re-audit everything every year. There's a sort of built-in efficiency in the financial audit, because we're there almost continuously.
However, on performance audits, we will pick areas that we may not have audited for many years. For example, in Tuesday's report we have one on the collection of accounts receivable. The last time we looked at that was over 10 years ago. Just because of the breadth of the federal government, we are unable to do a lot of performance audits and cover all the areas.
We've also tried to determine the number of performance audits that we think parliamentary committees can actually handle. In fact, this committee recommended that we perhaps look again at the number of reports we were tabling in a year. We have in fact, over the past five years, reduced the number of performance audits that we are doing. There was a point in time when we were doing 40 or more; we are now doing between 25 and 30 performance audits. We have brought the numbers down.
Performance audits are costly. I would say they would cost on average $1 million or $1.5 million.