Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. We too are delighted to be here and to help the committee in any way we can with its important work. I'm particularly pleased to be here to speak to the Auditor General's recently tabled report on required reporting by federal organizations.
I'm joined by Bill Matthews, the comptroller general of Canada, and Rita Whittle who is the executive director of security and identity management in our office of the chief information officer branch at the Treasury Board Secretariat.
First, I would like to thank the Office of the Auditor General for their report and recommendations. The issues they examined are extremely important. Reporting is the cornerstone of accountability, transparency and openness.
The Treasury Board is responsible for establishing the rules and the requirements for financial, personnel, and administrative management across government.
As the administrative arm of the Treasury Board, the secretariat supports deputy heads as accounting officers to implement and ensure compliance with Treasury Board policy requirements within their respective departments and agencies. The secretariat in that context requests and collects certain information from departments, as required by Treasury Board policies, to demonstrate compliance and the presence of expected management practices.
The secretariat also collects information in support of legislative and parliamentary requirements. One example is the data for the Main Estimates. Although the secretariat works with departments and agencies to reduce the burden of providing the base information, the requirements for these reports are beyond our control and were appropriately excluded from this audit.
The secretariat is conscious of the fact that preparing and providing reports can place a burden on departments. In recognition of this, the Treasury Board has given the secretariat formal direction on reporting through the foundation framework, which is at the very heart of the Treasury Board policy suite. The framework includes a set of smart reporting principles which state that reporting requirements should respect the oversight responsibilities and accountabilities of deputy heads, have a clear purpose, seek timely information to meet that purpose, and be efficient. That is to say that the cost to create and submit information should be minimal, leverage existing data sources, and not duplicate other requirements.
As an example of the secretariat's commitment to these principles, although it will take some time to put these in place, instead of having to ask departments to report, we are assessing the potential for systems that already have the base information that can be extracted to prepare a report.
As demonstrated by the Office of the Auditor General's report and recommendations, we recognize that there is room for improvement and that there are some more immediate steps that we can take. To this end, the secretariat is committed to the ongoing refinement of the policy suite and finding the right balance between the burden of reporting and the utility of the reports.
As part of our path forward, the secretariat has prepared a management action plan that has been shared with the Auditor General and with this committee.
I would like to conclude by briefly taking the opportunity to provide you with some of the highlights.
The secretariat is updating our guidance to ensure that not only the effort, cost, and value of a report but also the size and mandate of reporting organizations are considered when designing a reporting requirement.
The secretariat is also making a schedule of all reporting requirements publicly available.
The secretariat is reviewing the departmental security plan guidelines to provide effective support to departments in their development, maintenance, and reporting of their plans.
Finally, the secretariat is assessing the feasibility of new reporting mechanisms to more efficiently meet quarterly financial reporting requirements.
Thank you for your time, Mr. Chair. My colleagues and I would be pleased to answer any questions from the committee that we can.