Thank you.
At this point, we are in our planning process for the 2020 fall report right now. We have had to plan for fall 2019 and spring 2020 based on the funding we have already in place. We worked through the government process, worked with the Minister of Finance and with the Treasury Board.
We received the funding that we got in budget 2018 in October of 2018. We have started to try spending that money by hiring staff, by putting contracts in place that we need to work through the next year, but at this point in time, if we receive additional funding we expect it would probably be coming in budget 2020, in which case we will have to wait until the government process for allocating those funds is complete.
What Auditor General Michael Ferguson asked for was a budget funding mechanism for the Office of the Auditor General. He would have extended it to other agents of Parliament—in fact, he wrote that to the Minister of Finance—whose work is linked directly to the work we do. In the case of the Auditor General, that could be to overall government program expenditures. Without the funding in our hands, however, we can't plan for audits that we would like to do.