Evidence of meeting #28 for Public Accounts in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was departments.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
The only way to do that would be to go out to a couple of dozen departments and get them to do manual reports that could be combined in a manual kind of process. That's the way you would have to do that.
Liberal
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I'n not aware of any departments that would do anything weekly—it just doesn't happen that way. But I would expect them all to do monthly reports.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Do those monthly reports make their way to your desk, just for the expenditures?
Conservative
Daryl Kramp Conservative Prince Edward—Hastings, ON
Mr. Chair, on this issue, there's a difference between past and present. In most cases, government ops deals with the present. Public accounts deals with the past to make recommendations for the future. It is my understanding that your question is being dealt with in government ops. They have exercised the option of bringing some departments before government ops to ask them to report on this spending. That is not the purview of this committee. That is the purview of that committee.
I think Mr. Monette has made that clear. Am I correct?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
You're correct that there's no point in both of us doing it. I agree with you there. If they're doing it, I certainly hope we don't do it.
Do you agree with the four points, then? The information is available. The Fiscal Monitor, how does that come about? Do you do that, Mr. Matthews?
Acting Assistant Comptroller General, Financial Management and Analysis Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
I will speak to how the central consolidation system works for government, because it drives both public accounts and there's a link to the Fiscal Monitor. The departments submit their trial balance, and they report monthly to the centre and the Receiver General. The Receiver General assembles these data.
Just to drive home the example, that's a very high-level system that's built to support consolidation of 150 entities. What we track is departments, something about the votes, and the general ledger code. That's pretty much it. Take National Defence. From a Government of Canada perspective, we care that we have buildings, vehicles, or aircraft as fixed assets. I'm using some loose categories here. If you're a CFO at National Defence, you're tracking tanks and a whole list of different types of vehicles. It's far more detailed at the department than what we care about at the centre.
That's the distinction between a departmental financial system, for which the CFO would have details, versus what we receive at the centre. It's that process at the centre that drives up the Fiscal Monitor, which is a Department of Finance publication.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
I guess we've learned the difference between an expenditure and an allocation, though I'm not sure it matters much to my constituents. Vote 35 has been very important to my riding of Oakville. My announcements are all based on the allocation and the beginning of the implementation. We've announced $54 million in much-needed projects in Oakville, which, matching funds with the province and the town, will be about $162 million to help create jobs. There's $15 million just for students in Oakville, for a new campus in Mississauga to expand Sheridan College; $15.2 million will go to create 1,000 parking spaces at the Go Transit, which is about 12 years overdue; $8.3 million will give the homes in west Oakville a new waste water treatment plant to replace one that was built in the 1950s. All told, there are hundreds of people, maybe thousands, who are going to get work out of all this economic activity.
So I guess I'm going to have a little trouble going back and explaining to them whether it's an allocation or an expenditure. But as long as the money flows, they won't mind. The talk that has been going on with the leader of the official opposition this week is pretty stressful for them. I'm hoping that everything goes well on Friday and the opposition members vote to proceed and do what's happening in Oakville right across Canada.
I would like to ask Mr. Monette how many person-hours of work or full-time equivalents it would take to produce these weekly reports if this motion were properly worded and it said “supported by” instead of whatever it says? What might that cost?
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I have to say that in my experience doing a weekly report is almost.... I wouldn't say it's impossible, but when you get into a big organization right across the country, to do something weekly means that you need to have people inputting into the system on a weekly basis. My experience has been that it's not very accurate.
So as for weekly reports, I'm not aware that anybody does them in departments for the most part, but I would almost say that it's not even really a matter of resources, although it would be a huge amount of resources and I would have a hard time guessing what that it might be. But I don't think it would be very accurate. So that takes you to the monthly. That's why people do monthly reports.
On the monthly, every chief financial officer in their department is supposed to make sure that they do their accounting properly, and they should be looking after their budget expenditures. If you had to build a system to do that automatically, to pull that up, you could use the Receiver General system, I suppose, but you'd have to go....
I know I'm not getting to your question very directly, and I apologize--
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
I'm kind of guessing that it would be in the millions of dollars anyway, but I would really need to have a look at it, because there is some infrastructure there now. We do have the Receiver General, and they do data collection at a government-wide level. But to figure out in this particular case how you would change the coding at the government-wide level, fix that up, and do that, I think it would be a pretty significant exercise.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Thank you.
I'd like some very quick clarification. As the Comptroller General, do you have access to the central financial management reporting system?
Acting Assistant Comptroller General, Financial Management and Analysis Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
That's maintained by the Receiver General. I do get reports on a monthly basis from that, and my staff do have access to the database.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Okay. So again, if you're getting it on a monthly basis, can we have the current information that you have on your system regarding the amount of money per department that was lapsed? It's very easy to get it.
Acting Assistant Comptroller General, Financial Management and Analysis Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
I believe this motion was debated at OGGO this morning. As we discussed earlier, the system itself is maintained by PWGSC, the Receiver General, so it's not for me to--
Acting Assistant Comptroller General, Financial Management and Analysis Sector, Treasury Board Secretariat
I have access to the data. It's not my data to release, though.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Okay, it's not your data. So that's the technical issue--
Comptroller General of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat
If I may, I'll also add something. Correct me if I don't have this right, but my understanding is that this database shows all the expenditures, and I don't believe it actually shows the amount of the vote. So to figure out how much is lapsed, you need to know the difference between the two.