When we put our budget together, Mr. Chair, the first thing, of course, is the financial audits we have to do. The financial audits are audits of financial statements. We do roughly 120 of them, including the Public Accounts of Canada, and then financial statements of various crown corporations and agencies. Those have to be done every year. That's the first chunk of our budget.
Then we look at the resources we have in order to do performance audits. We go through a very rigorous planning process, which looks out probably three or four years, to determine where we are going to put our resources on the performance audit side. That is done using a risk-based approach.
Part of our activities are to do what we call “strategic audit plans”. For different pieces of the government's business, we will go in and do risk assessments, and then determine which areas we think we want to do performance audits on. We will look out over a three- or four-year time period to determine which audits we want to do.
Certainly, in that, if parliamentarians have things they want us to look at, we are always happy to receive that input. We'll take it and we'll put it into our whole planning process to determine whether those specific items are things that we should be looking at versus what we had already planned to look at.