First of all, regarding the management of grants and contributions, perhaps we could defer the question, because in our report that is coming next week we have done a follow-up audit on the management of grants and contributions programs, and you will see the conclusion we have as to whether there are sufficient management procedures in place.
Essentially, many of the departments have specific procedures for a particular type of granting program. One example that comes to mind is first nations funding. There are requirements for annual financial audits to be produced, and in fact if those audits aren't produced, the first nation loses its funding. There are many requirements like that, and we can perhaps discuss that a little more next week.
Regarding the audits of crown corporations, there was an amendment to our mandate last summer in the budget implementation bill, Bill C-43, that named us as auditor or co-auditor of all crown corporations except two. Before that, we were doing almost all of the crown corporations, but that added three crown corporations to the audits we do, the most important being Canada Post. We will be undertaking those new mandates in this coming year, and we will be co-auditors of Canada Post, for example. There are only two that we don't audit.
The Comptroller General has been doing a lot of work to try to reinforce the internal audit capacity within government. There is a requirement that all departments and agencies have an internal audit function of some sort. They are working to establish audit committees in departments.
To the extent that we can, we try to rely on internal audit work, but there is still much improvement that needs to be done in that function throughout government. We did an audit on internal audit in 2004. Our basic conclusion was that the function needed to be professionalized; they needed to bring in more people with the required expertise and give them more resources, more training.
So there are a number of issues that needed to be addressed. But it is going in the right direction, and certainly the intention is there.