Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, Mr. Lévesque, for your kind words. It's very encouraging when parliamentarians appreciate the work we do.
WIth respect to recommendations, each year we do a follow up with departments and agencies. We do a status report on the implementation of the recommendations put forward four years earlier. We ask the department to provide us with a follow-up report or to explain what steps it has taken, and the team responsible for this department assesses the credibility of the response and determines if these are satisfactory or not.
In addition, each year, the Office releases a Status Report in which we review our audits of certain areas and judge whether or not satisfactory progress has been achieved on the recommendations made previously. The 2006 Status Report will be released next week.
We use both the responses provided by the departments and the Status Report to compile our statistics.
I also have to say that the 44 per cent compliance rate is not acceptable to us. We've launched an initiative with the Office of the Comptroller General to find out why departments are not following through with the recommendations. Yet, all of the departments said they agreed with the recommendations when they were first made.
On the other hand, the Office has come to realize that it needs to improve the quality of the recommendations to make them somewhat clearer. This would make it easier to judge whether any progress has been made. Occasionally, we felt that our recommendations were too general. Efforts are therefore being made on both sides, in the hope that some improvement will be noted.
Lastly, the committee has been most helpful to us. In recent years, it has called on departments to produce an action plan identifying the parties responsible for making improvements as well as target implementation dates. We rely on the action plan to ascertain when we can re-audit the department. I even think these plans make the system more rigorous. The committee has therefore done us a great service in recent years by requiring these action plans.