Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thanks, Ms. Fraser for being here again. It's good to see you again.
I have a couple comments before I get to a couple of questions here.
Mr. Proulx, I noticed you talked about not having bonus systems and referred to the importance of more quality than quantity in terms of the staffing there. I would think that when you're talking about debt collection, there's a direct correlation between the two and right now the quantity is $18 billion of taxpayer money. So I think there is a correlation there.
Mr. Wrzesnewskyj talked about a post-recession period. I would say that a post-recession period could also be called a pre-prosperity period. Whatever you call it, at the time you made enough money to pay taxes and it should have been paid--for the most part.
Mr. Baker also alluded to that as well by saying we always have people who experience hardship and can't pay. My comment on this is that at the time the taxes are owed, for the most part the system is such that at that time they should be able to afford to pay. The trouble is that we're not collecting at that time. That seems very problematic to me. If we had collected the money at the right time, we would be able to collect more of it.
This leads to my question for the Auditor General first. You mentioned you had no problem with the decision to write off the $2.7 billion that's written off. Could we have saved some of that money if we had done better job of collecting it in the first place, and to what extent?