I understand all that but if the financial statements of a department are not audited, what assurance can the accounts administrator have about the quality and correctness of the accounts he is signing? Furthermore, if we have no independent opinion, what assurance can we have, if nobody audits the accounts, does any follow-up and control? So far, we have seen no example of best practices at Treasury Board.
Earlier, you referred to the Department of National Defense, which is very topical since I have the last internal audits of that department. The first and main finding relates to noncompliance with section 34 of the Financial Administration Act. That is the section relating to ensuring that the goods we are paying for--here, they refer to payments to suppliers--have really been delivered and services provided, which is not insignificant.
According to their estimates, this applies to 1% of the funds. What is the budget of National Defense? Several billions of dollars, perhaps. Here, I see a reference to "ensuring that contractual obligations are defined and met". I look at the internal audit reports. What assurance do we have that those audits are used by someone? Who follows up?
On Tuesday, we met with people dealing with the modernization of human resources management. During that meeting, we asked how they used the internal audit reports and the recommendations made about human resources management.