Thank you, Wayne.
I'm on page 10 now of the presentation.
The Office of the Comptroller General really has two main interests, one being the financial management and the other being the internal audit function. One of the things we do is try to make sure departments and agencies have the right oversight mechanisms in place in these two areas.
The committee has asked me to focus more specifically on internal audits, so I'll do that. If there are any questions on the finance side, I'd be happy to answer those later on this afternoon.
Basically the internal audit function provides an objective look at all of management. We don't hold back from anything. We'll have a look at all the issues that management has to deal with. Every year there are in the neighbourhood of about 250 audits done through the internal audit function across government. Basically the way this is intended to work is that my office will identify risks across the government, and then we will identify those for departments. We will guide those 250 audits into those main risk areas. They'll also do their own assessment of risk. They marry their own assessment of risk up with ours. That's the way we influence that overall audit function.
We'll move on to page 11.
Internal Audit Policy has instituted several key features, including: clear assignment of accountabilities and roles and responsibilities; enhancement of perceived and real independence of internal audit through changes to reporting relationships; inclusion of a majority of external members on audit committees; and adoption of professional auditing standards and practices.
This has led to, I think, better accountability in the departments. The audit committees are functioning, I think, in a more effective way with these external members and getting in a better bang for the buck.
In terms of the audit capacity, maybe I can just mention a few statistics here. Three years ago there were about 325 internal auditors in government. We're up to about 560 now. So we've had an increase of about 70%, which is getting pretty close to where I think we need to be. As I mentioned, there are the 250 audits happening through the function. As well, my office has started in the last year to do horizontal audits. We've done a couple of those, and we're continuing on with those as well. All of this is designed to, based on where we see the risks, improve the management practices in government.
Merci.
Back to you, Wayne.