Thank you, Chair.
Let me start by answering the question of who audits the Auditor General, which is obviously put to us quite frequently. In our financial statements, we have an audit that is done by a firm from the private sector named by the Treasury Board. Our financial statements are audited each year and are included in our departmental performance report.
What is more significant to an office like ours are what we call the peer reviews or external reviews of the quality of our work. There are a number of reviews that are carried out. First of all, we carry out our own internal practice reviews as are required under professional standards. We have the institutes of chartered accountants of various provinces come in to review our work to ensure that we can continue to have students that come to work in the office and receive their training with us.
We have begun, over the past few years, to have external reviews done. The first external review of our financial audit practice was done in 1999 by one of the major accounting firms in Canada, and in 2003 we had a review done of our performance audit practice. Performance audit is quite unique to legislative auditors, so we thought long and hard about who should do that review and decided to ask our international colleagues to review our work. So it was a team of the national audit offices of the Netherlands, Norway, and France, led by Great Britain, that came and did a review of the office. That report is available on our website.
We are currently preparing for another review, which will no longer involve simply practice areas, but the whole office, including our corporate services. That review will be led by the Auditor-General for Australia and will include other national audit offices that have not yet been determined, but as soon as those details are worked out, we will certainly be informing the committee of that. All of those reviews actually assess a quality management system, and indicate that our quality management system is appropriate and that we are following that quality management system. As in any audit, there are, of course, recommendations, and our action plan with the recommendations is posted and indicates how we are dealing with all of that.
On the specific question of the international financial reporting standards, IFRS, they do apply to the crown corporations or many of the crown corporations. They do not apply to government per se, because government uses the public sector accounting standards. But this is a major initiative under way, and you can imagine that for some of the very large crown corporations like Canada Post or EDC or CBC this is significant. So we have been working with the crowns, encouraging them to do the diagnostics and reviewing with them the changes that this will mean for their accounting and other financial management systems, because IFRS can have a great impact on more than simply the accounting and the financial statements. This will go into effect in 2011, and they have to have, of course, comparative figures, so that means it actually has to be in effect next year. So it's coming very quickly for these crowns.