Very briefly, Mr. Chairman, I will try to go from memory of what's included in my letter.
With respect to the performance audit practice, the work we're discussing here today, we are proposing that we would continue at roughly the same level of activity we're presently doing. We reduced that practice a number of years ago in response to funding pressures we were facing at the time.
At that time, we were producing 35 or so of these reports a year for Parliament. We've since reduced that to between 25 and 30. We think that's a good number. We think that gives us an opportunity to effectively cover most areas of government operations over a 10-year period, and we think we can get an appropriate level of parliamentary engagement in our performance audit practice at that level.
The key areas of proposed cuts are in our financial audit practice. What we're proposing is to discontinue I think almost 20 of the annual financial audits we do of a number of smaller government organizations. Our thinking there was, if we're not auditing the annual financial statements of big government departments like the Department of National Defence or Public Works and Government Services, we weren't sure we were getting good value for money from auditing the very small boards and agencies or tribunals.
For the most part, we're required by legislation to do those audits so we will need legislative changes in order to be able to effect those changes.
We've also done a very careful review of our internal services, our corporate services, and are proposing some cuts in that area as well. This involves things like stretching out our computer replacement policy. Right now, we replace laptops over three years. We'll stretch it out to four years. Other changes like that will reduce internal corporate services in response to the current fiscal environment.
In total, Mr. Chairman, the proposed cuts we think we can implement, subject to the legislative change between now and the fiscal year 2014–15, are approximately $6 million or $6.5 million, or 8% of our current main estimates funding. This will also comprise some 8% to 10% of our staff. We will have to downsize the staff to implement that, and we're reasonably confident we can do it largely through attrition, through retraining, and through redeployment in the office.