Yes, and this is one of the areas where the picture has improved a little bit since the snapshot was taken by the Auditor General almost a year ago. They caught us partially implementing some of the flexibilities that the transfer payment policy provides.
I do want to go on the record again and say that making a better tool out of contribution agreements is not a complete answer. We over-rely on contribution agreements as a tool. But that being said, I think we can make them smarter and more flexible, and lessen some of the paper burden and bureaucratic overload on first nations. That's a topic the Auditor General has gone back to many times.
We have now been able to hammer out more standard language, language that is common to us and other funding departments. Last year there were about 250 multi-year agreements. We're at well over 750 now. There are some agreements now that are five-years, some that are seven-years, and I think we even have one that is ten-years long agreement. So that has certainly reduced the burden of constant renegotiation of these agreements.
We are working on a couple of pilot projects to see if we can have a single agreement across three or four departments that's a lot easier for the first nation to deal with. There's a very good pilot in Quebec, in Mashteuiatsh, on that front. And we're trying one up north, as well. We have done the risk assessment, which the chapter saw as incomplete at the time. So we've done a thorough risk assessment of all of our recipients, and we're going through a second round of that. That will give us some reasonably objective basis to give some communities much more flexible and long-term agreements. And for others where there's higher risk, we would have shorter and less flexible agreements.