Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We are pleased to be here and would like to thank you for this opportunity to discuss our 2010-11 performance report and our 2012-13 report on plans and priorities.
With me today are Lyn Sachs, assistant auditor general of corporate services, and chief financial officer; and Andrew Lennox, assistant auditor general and a test audit product leader.
We are privileged to support Parliament's oversight of government spending and performance. We provide objective information, advice and assurance, from the financial audits, performance audits and special examinations of crown corporations that we conduct each year.
All of our audit work is conducted according to Canadian auditing standards and standards on quality control. We subject our system of quality control to internal practice reviews and to external reviews by peers to provide assurance that you can rely on the quality of our work.
During our 2010-11 fiscal year, the period covered by our most recent performance report, we used $86.7 million of the $88.3 million in parliamentary appropriations available to us. In light of the fiscal climate at the time we did not seek additional funding in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 fiscal years. Rather, we sought opportunities to reduce our expenses and redeploy auditors within the office. We employed the equivalent of 629 full-time employees during the 2010-11 fiscal year, a decrease of three from the year before.
With these resources, in 2010-11 we completed 148 financial and performance audits and special examinations of crown corporations, including work done by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. Parliamentary use of our work remained high. The office participated in 46 hearings and briefings. Parliamentary committees reviewed 62% of our performance audits.
Our 2010-11 Performance Report contains a number of indicators of the impact of our work and measures of our operational performance. Our targets and actual performance results are attached to this statement.
For the 2010-11 fiscal year, our performance report shows that almost all of our indicators of impact remained positive. Senior managers in the organizations we audited assessed the value of our work more highly than they had in the past three years.
Our measures of organizational performance also remained generally positive, though we were unable to sustain the significant gains we made in 2009-10, when we delivered more than 85% of our financial audits on-budget.
Our office also continued to be recognized as a workplace of choice, placing on the top employer lists for four major awards. While there were areas for improvement, overall, the office had successful years in 2009-10 and 2010-11 under the leadership of my predecessor, Sheila Fraser.