We spoke on the policy renewal process earlier on. It might be worth describing a little of what has been done with the MAF.
In the case of the oversight tools that the secretary spoke about, the ones that were described were critical ones. MAF is also a very important tool for us to track how well the departments are actually managing the enterprise. I don't know to what extent the committee members are familiar with it, but through 21 areas of management we track all the key lines of activities that a department or agency would be expected to perform, and perform well. In doing so, we set out what the expectation is from the centre, from the Treasury Board perspective.
In doing that, we were engineering along the way very much in response to what the small agencies network has been telling us. They said they totally recognized the importance of improving public sector management. They are all aware of the events that happened early in 2000 and they don't want to be caught in that situation. We work with them to find a way to get to that desired outcome by getting back to the balance the secretary was discussing and by minimizing meaningfully the amount of work that is required of them.
We came up with three levels of requirements that have to be performed.
Large departments and agencies above 500 FTEs and $300 million budgets have to go through an annual assessment and through all those various stages.
Smaller ones, those below 500 FTEs, go through an assessment only every three years. In the years between, they're free to do some self-evaluation or have ongoing dialogue with the Treasury Board, but they don't have to publish a report to the centre over and above what they would normally do for legislative or parliamentary purposes. Right there is a very significant time saver from their perspective.
Micro-agencies used to be those with under 15 employees, but we cranked it up to 50. Below 50 employees, an interview of two hours or so does the job. We have a conversation with the heads of those organizations. There may be some follow-up discussions if some issues warrant extra attention, but we felt overall that this was actually a very good example of striving to achieve the balance we were talking about. Certainly that's the feedback we've been getting on MAF particularly.
As we renew TB policies, we're trying to do the same thing by having this gradation. We don't want to lose sight of what's going on there, but we want to do it thoughtfully and deliberately and address those concerns in a meaningful way. In our view, these are meaningful and impactful ways to get at it.