Yes, I do. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for this opportunity to address the issue of our reports being leaked to the media before being tabled in the House of Commons.
As you mentioned, I am accompanied today by Ronnie Campbell, Assistant Auditor General.
As this committee knows, I take my relationship with Parliament very seriously. My office takes every reasonable step to ensure that our reports are not disclosed to the public before they are tabled in the House of Commons. Premature disclosure represents a disregard for the statutory right of the House of Commons to receive our reports and may represent a breach of parliamentary privilege.
Since 2001, 10 performance audit reports were leaked to journalists before they were tabled in the House of Commons. Although they represent a small portion of the 147 performance audit reports that we presented during this period, 10 leaks are still too many.
When we appeared before the committee on this matter on May 15, I outlined the safeguards we had in place to protect the confidentiality of our reports, and I do not want to take up the committee's time by going into those details again today.
I would simply like to remind you that we provide draft reports to the departments and agencies to validate facts, present our observations and recommendations, and give the departments and agencies the opportunity to prepare a response which will be published in the final version of the report. This is a critical stage of the audit process, but it clearly has some risks.
As part of our internal review of the most recent leak, we analyzed the article about the relocation chapter published in the Globe and Mail on November 8, 2006. The article appears to cite information from a number of sources: our draft chapter, information that is publicly available, and an unidentified source who appears to be familiar with the content of our report and the government's response to it.
As if often the case, it is not clear whether the Globe and Mail reporter saw a copy of the draft report or was verbally briefed on its contents. After this most recent incident, we reviewed our process with the RCMP, who had no recommendations for improvement.
We are satisfied that our processes are appropriate, and we do not believe that the leak came from our office. Nonetheless, we recognize that leaks—deliberate or inadvertent—are not acceptable.
Mr. Chair, we are taking further steps to ensure that the departments and agencies that are the subjects of our audits are following appropriate procedures to protect the confidentiality of our reports. During each audit, we will be writing to senior officials to remind them of their responsibility to follow appropriate procedures to protect the confidentiality of our reports. And we will not release draft chapters to departments until we have received written acknowledgement of these responsibilities. We hope these additional measures will make a difference in safeguarding the information in our reports. We are deeply concerned about this situation and we are prepared to take any practical steps to help resolve the issue.
That concludes our opening statement, Mr. Chair. We would be pleased to answer any questions committee members may have.
Thank you.