Thank you, Mr. Chair.
At the core we like to be able to provide you with information to help you discharge your responsibility to hold the government to account. When you look at that, the question becomes: what are some of the programs that are of significance and relevance to Canadians and to Parliament? That is the underlying premise that we would start with.
We've identified approximately 16 or 17 subject areas that we think are of importance. We talked about a few of them. Public safety would be one of them, for example. That's currently a subject that is of interest to a lot of people. Defence is usually an area: military spending is big dollars; it involves our sovereignty and the like. The aboriginal file and the north are also subject areas. We also talked a little bit about government management and government processes, so financial management and control is of importance. Why did we do a Shared Services Canada audit? IT is such a really critical element to supporting any form of operation that there is a need to have a look-see to see if there are problems there.
What we try to do is to also see how we can add value to the process. If it's an area that's been well studied, committees have been very thorough through that, the government community itself, through its own audit function, has studied extensively, and lots of evaluation has been done, then we look at that and we propose a slate to the Auditor General. We say that it's well covered. The Auditor General was trying to explain the concept of residual risk. Having done all of this, what's left? Is there something that we can look at and can we add some value to the subject? That's how we go about choosing it.
Once a year we review our list and we see out of those subject areas which ones are perhaps more actual in terms of issues that people are concerned with. The Auditor General also identifies services to Canadians. Not only do we look at what government does—government does what it does; it has a program and it goes about implementing it—but we look at it from the recipient point of view. Do we see that there are issues that people seem to be more concerned with? Then maybe we want to put an audit lens on it to see if there's any useful information we can bring to Parliament through our reports.
We also attempt to offer advice to you, and that takes the form of recommendations to government. As you know, our recommendations are made to departments and agencies, but really, they do not carry any authority. They have to be studied by a committee, and in turn you write a report and you provide a recommendation, which then compels the government to respond and say if it is going to do something about it. Again, we try to add value that way to identify areas where improvements can be made so that government can use that as a way to move forward.