For our financial audit, we have a strategic alliance with one of the major accounting firms, and we are taking over all of their methodology. We will obviously have to adapt some of it, because legislative audit is a little different from the private sector. But for the financial statements, most of it is the same. Where we are quite different is in the performance audit and the special examinations. Those are unique to legislative audit, and I would say special examinations are actually unique to the federal government. No other government, to our knowledge, has anything like a special examination. So we have to develop that ourselves. There obviously is methodology that has existed, so we will be building on that. But it's also changing all of our.... We have banks of electronic tools, electronic working papers, all of that, so this is a significant challenge to us. That is clearly our priority going forward for the next year.
I think the other challenge we have to continue to manage—and we've been successful so far—is the staffing of the office to make sure that our people are happy working with us, that they get challenging, interesting work, and I will be pleased when we get the final staff survey that we are just in the process of finalizing to share the results with the committee. We've had excellent results in the past, and I hope that we can continue to do that. Ms. Sachs mentioned recruitment. Our best recruitment is our own staff, who bring in their colleagues from the private sector. We have to make sure that our people stay with us and are pleased with what they're doing and have challenging, interesting work to do. I think the training goes with that, to make sure that our people continue to keep abreast of new developments, of standards.
Then I would add that the last thing that we have to manage during the coming year is the transition to a new Auditor General. I am pleased we have had some indications that the search process will be beginning soon, and I am hopeful that there will be someone who will be identified so that we can do a transition over a few months, and I think that will help, as well, to reassure staff that things will continue on.