Yes, and that is what we have been working to streamline and simplify. We're dealing—until the time of the audit, frankly—with many legacy issues, the continuance for too long of a particular application process and decision process.
As I indicated, as part of our CPP service improvement strategy, we are progressively moving to an online and electronic system to reduce the paper burden. However, the legacy of these programs has for too long been a paper-based system. That adds complexity and has added inordinately to the time. That has to change, and it constitutes a very significant part of the application process.
With respect to the decisions on appeal—please understand that this is in no way an excuse—there are going to be inevitably some reversals of the decision on appeal, for a variety of reasons. The decision-maker on appeal believes, in good faith, that the initial decision—taken, I would assert, in good faith—is incorrect, that the initial decision-maker just got it wrong, and the decision is overturned.
The second thing, which actually happens very often, is that the applicant's situation has changed over the course of the review, and often what would correctly have been an unfavourable decision becomes now, because of new evidence—the evolution of the patient's condition, or for that matter, new medical knowledge—a different decision. That will, to some degree, always be the case.
The third category was that when we put together this team of people to go through this backlog as rapidly as possible, we asked them, in cases in which on a balance of probabilities the decision would be reversed, to make that decision quickly and not let it go through the rest of the process.
Those are the three kinds of situations that will lead—or did lead, in this case—to an overturned decision.
These are, even in cases in which the ultimate decision is not in favour of the client, difficult situations. At their very best they are very difficult situations. The initial adjudicator has to make those difficult decisions on the basis of the evidence, and the reason for there being an appeal process is to catch any errors or to make a different decision.