The Federal Accountability Act will not affect directly those respective roles. It will be any changes that we make to the financial management policies that will do so.
But we can provide that to you, based on what the current policies are. I just want to make sure the committee is aware that those policies are now under review.
On MAF, of course, we have been undertaking the assessments for the past number of years. MAF, as a tool, has been in place now for at least three years and it has been generally accepted by departments. Our role is to undertake those assessments--I think that's what you're talking about--of overall management performance.
For us it's been very much a work in progress. It's been a learning process for us as to how we do this. We've had to establish the indicators by which we can assess. We've had to ensure that we're comfortable with that. We've had to ensure that we could get the evidence, so it's evidence-based. We've been working our way through this, so we've been somewhat reluctant to release this, because we are doing assessments in the department.
There are a number of access to information requests now that we are at the point to say that, based on the last round of assessments, which was the third year, we have moved far enough along that we could begin to make this available publicly, with the caveat that the last round of assessments was done about a year and a half ago. It's a snapshot and requires the recognition that we still have a way to go in terms of our abilities within the secretariat to undertake some assessments. There will be certain areas where we did an assessment and we said, if we did it over again, we'd probably do it somewhat differently.
I just want to make those points as we go to release this. It is a work in progress.