I'm not certain I take your point that there was a breakdown. I certainly recognize that it's been a long while since there's been a package of technical amendments implemented, but it's important to review the history of this.
We have said or acknowledged that it would be desirable to have a package of technical amendments issued annually. I think that was said at a time before the comfort letters themselves were functionally being published. For the past several years they have been published by the commercial tax services within a month of two of their issuance by us. So communication of the contents of the comfort letters is less of an issue than it was at that time.
That doesn't take away from the point that it would be desirable to issue this draft legislation and proposed amendments as regularly as possible. Our practice until now has been to do it only after the previous income tax technical amendments package has been implemented. The issue in this case is that the last income tax technical amendments package was published by the department or issued by the Minister of Finance in late 2002. It was issued in revised form in 2004 and again in 2005, and then introduced by this government in 2006 and reintroduced in 2007, but it wasn't passed. So that technical amendments package has not yet passed.
What I believe the Auditor General has identified as a concern is that, because of the languishing of the bill, the rest of the technical amendments packages or technical amendments that we have outstanding have not been processed. I think, and we have acknowledged, that this calls for some review of our practice of only issuing another package after the prior one has been implemented. For that reason, we're proposing to issue others before this one goes forward.