I don't think it's significantly different. Let me just give you an outline of our mandate and what it entails. We do all of the financial statement audits of Commonwealth- or Australian government-controlled entities. All together there are about 243 entities. We in Australia do departments of state. Departments are required to produce financial statements. They in turn are consolidated into the government's own accounts, along with all of the transactions of all the other government-controlled entities. I think that may be different from the situation in Canada, where your departments are required to have individual reports in the first place and you're required to audit them. So that's on the financial statement side.
Regarding the performance audits, we do about 50 a year. One perhaps important difference is that I can table reports whether Parliament is sitting or not. I can table reports all through the year. So we produce individual performance audit reports on a program or topic, and I can table those. We produce 50-odd a year. They're about 100 pages long, and each one costs us about $500,000.
We have a very broad performance audit mandate. The only thing is that at the moment I am not able to undertake a performance audit of a government business enterprise. I've raised with my own public accounts committee whether that should be changed and whether that constraint should continue to be in our legislation. We have fewer and fewer government business enterprises as the years go by, because Australian governments have tended to sell off many of the commercial entities that formerly were GBEs, so it's not such a significant issue as it used to be.
We have a wide performance audit mandate. I think we pretty much go through similar sorts of processes. Some are more sensitive than others. I get heavily involved in the sensitive ones, including in discussions with the chief executives about the matters being raised. Of course, then, we table the reports in very much the same way. Our public accounts committee here in Australia has a statutory obligation to review each of the performance audit reports we produce. In some cases they will have an inquiry into the matters.
To that extent, I think there are far more similarities than differences, Chair.