I thank you for your comments, Mr. Volpe.
Departments have done a lot of work to prepare themselves for the audits. In this committee, we regularly receive reports from the Office of the Auditor General indicating significant problems in some departments. Our researcher has noticed:
a lack of documentation to support balances, policies, procedures and controls for key business processes; and challenges with information technology, such as difficulties in transferring information arising from manual adjustments required in many of the legacy systems.
The goal of preparing a department for audits was to be able to see if policies and regulations relating to public data are appropriate. I am not convinced that, in the long run, we will get better controls if we slow the pace of audits. In her testimony of May 11, the Auditor General stated that:
Quite frankly, the government does not seem to view this as a priority at the current time. So we asked why we would continue to work on something when obviously we would have to probably reduce performance audits even more to do this work. We have clearly indicated to government that should they decide that this is a priority, and there is a policy, then we would be quite pleased, of course, to reconsider our position on it. Unless we get an indication from them, we do not think we should be doing it.
Do you believe that there is a policy or a clear commitment from the government? Is that reflected in the new policy published on the site?