Thank you.
Welcome to our committee. Just to comment, I was glad, when I looked at it, that you were able to be a part of our earlier discussion.
One thing that has happened at this committee, and I've been involved now for just two years, is that the Auditor General—and you represent that function or you are the Auditor General in your country—has to come to Parliament, which includes the representatives of all parties, with an incredible amount of credibility.
Our Auditor General—I say this not because she's sitting here, but just because she is our Auditor General—has that, and she has the respect, I believe, of all parties because she is thorough, she is reasonable, but she also brings a business sense and reasonable, understandable recommendations, which come to this committee through the agency or the ministerial departments that she is auditing.
When the Auditor General came to the agency with recommendations, recommendations sometimes were done and sometimes were not; nobody was seeming to ask why or why not. As I think you would see this morning from the agency in front of us, there is a lot of respect for the recommendations and a lot of movement on those recommendations, because now they know that the public accounts committee, if they fall behind, is going to ask them back to be accountable for why they didn't. Maybe they're going to have a good reason to explain why they couldn't, but that's all part of the accountability.
I just want to say that putting an action plan in place, recording what your status was, and then reporting back to the parliamentary committee has been very substantial in this, and it has come about by working together. I think, as the chairman has described, the independence of having the Auditor General not sit up with us and not be a part is very good, because it tells you that she's not collectively arm in arm with the public accounts committee but is actually independent and comes with those recommendations to an agency or a ministry.