Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you, and my apologies also for the first hour and a half, but democracy can be messy.
I want to deal with the issue of the business cases, similar to my colleague.
Paragraph 3.62 in the Auditor General's report states:
The business case is the foundation of every sound investment decision. For IT projects, the business case explains the rationale for the project and the project results that are needed to meet an organization's business needs.
Paragraph 3.22, on page 7, says:
In our previous audits we made recommendations about strengthening governance, business case analyses, project management, and assessments of organizational capacity. The EMF was developed to address these recommendations. Our current audit found that many problems, which our previous reports called attention to, persist because departments and agencies are not following the EMF.
And that, of course, was the result of a previous criticism that was meant to solve it, and then we find out that nobody's following it and that problem persists.
I note—and I'll throw it to whoever feels comfortable or gets the short end of the stick in answer—that in 1995 this came up, “inadequate analysis of underlying business issues”. It came up again in 1998. Paragraph 3.19 of the document says:
Since 1998, the Secretariat has produced little additional guidance on the management of large IT systems.
Let me just caution whoever is going to answer this, I understand all the things that you're going to do and the promises you're making. The answer I want is to know how we got to this point that we could go audit after audit with the same issue being pointed out as a problem, and it still remains a problem today.
Assuming that it gets fixed from this point forward—and that remains to be seen as we get into it more—I want to know how you could have ignored repeated audits that came up with the same conclusion, pointed out the same problem causing the same issues, and here we are again and it's still there. Why?