Perhaps an example would shed some light on the situation.
I think a typical example people would use to try to explain some of these issues is when you buy capital assets. You could buy assets right at the outset and have a major cash outlay in one year, or you could actually have a financial lease, which is really a financial arrangement over a period of time, so that you acquire the same asset but your payment stream is different.
Under a cash or near-cash appropriation basis, they actually would be coming forward to Parliament asking for very different sums, but in essence it's the same decision you're trying to make.
When you look at that, the two of them are not the same, but if you look at it on an accrual basis, the cash equation or the cost equation would be identical under both cases.
In some of the international experience they're running into a problem whereby if you allocate a ceiling or a certain sum of funds to be used for a particular purpose and not all of that is being expended in that year because it's a capital lease—and lease payments actually get paid out later on—or something of the sort, it's the management and the transparency of how that fund is going to be kept. Is it money kept aside for some other purposes that the government might have in mind?
It causes a lot of confusion in that sense. So those are some of the problems people run into, whereby if we go forward, we need to be careful about how we manage those kinds of issues.
Those are the basic differences between the two approaches, if that helps.