Certainly.
In general, we will set an audit objective. For example, in the chapter about aggressive tax planning the audit objective was to look at how the Department of Finance manages requests coming from the Canada Revenue Agency to make changes to legislation to deal with certain tax strategies.
We would have asked the Department of Finance for information about their process. They gave us an explanation of how the process works, but then they didn't give us any information that showed how they actually followed the process in the cases we were dealing with. So we would have explained to them exactly what we wanted and the type of evidence we were looking for. Then they would have gone through, looked at what they had available, and assessed it to determine whether it's cabinet confidence. In this case they determined it was cabinet confidence, which meant that we wouldn't get access to it. I think the other case was probably similar.
There is an agreement that says what type of information we do and do not have access to. Departments go through our requests, when we ask for something that is in specific types of documents, to determine whether it's in cabinet confidence documents. Once that decision is made, we obviously don't have access to the information.