Thank you.
To pick up on what the Auditor General just said, the responsibility of the Department of the Solicitor General at the time—now Public Safety—is as a service provider with respect to some human resource services and some financial management services. Basically we process the bills, the accounts given to us by the Office of the Correctional Investigator.
The lacuna, if you like—what I do not believe officials of the department did correctly and what we have now corrected—is that people were processing some documentation directly from the Correctional Investigator without a third-party attestation.
I cannot sign off for myself before I get a cheque to be reimbursed for travel, say, or hospitality. I fill out my claim like anyone else, but someone checks it for me to ensure that everything is according to the rules and the guidelines of the Treasury Board. That's an example.
The clerks who were allowing this were not requiring this additional check, and that's where the check and balance wasn't working. But I must add that these were clerical functions, and I cannot explain why it was done that way. It's not appropriate; we've now fixed it. You need that check.