Thank you very much, ma'am, for your question.
On the pricing, you're right. We have two problems. The first problem, of course, is legacy information. We have also a problem with the pricing of new items coming in.
If I may take two minutes, I just arrived as the deputy minister in 2015 and I too was wondering why it was taking so much time and why we were having problems with our pricing.
We have thousands of people, in fact, who have an impact on inventories and on entering information into the systems. We have to keep in mind that often.... I've done a bit of survey to look, because when I deal with the comptroller general when they do the audit, they keep referring to 2003, so I wanted to know what was done and why, 13 years later, this is where we are. We referred before to accrual accounting; it started in 2003. Just to have the Minister of National Defence change our financial system to an accrual basis meant that to be able to do our financial statement was a challenge.
When we entered all the information—and we combined between 2003 and 2013—it was to bring the defence financial management system and the materiel system together. We have done that, and now we have a new system called DRMIS, defence resource management information system, that has connected the materiel and the financial systems.
However, we have a lot of legacy information that came from the previous system that still has to be downloaded, and we are cleaning that up right now.
You will note, probably, that the comptroller general and the Auditor General both made reference to an allowance. For the first time, we have been working on suggestions from the auditors last year. Over the past year, we have developed a new process with an allowance to be able to at least find and evaluate the potential errors that we may have.
Right now we have started the first initiative. We are doing ammunition, because this is the most important part for us and it is where we have many items. The value is $3.5 billion, and we have 17,000 stock items. We are looking at the items by stock item—for example, ammunition. We have a three-way point, and we try to find a purchase order to be able to match the price so we can come back with a proper evaluation for the ammunition.
By the end of this fiscal year, we will finish the ammunition, and the plan is to do the consumable items over the next two years, but again, we are talking about $2.5 billion and 400,000 stock items. It is taking time, because we have people looking line by line in the system. At the same time, they are developing and working with our engineers to try to automate that system. We are getting there now, at least for ammunition. We have been able to automate that system so that when we enter the price, it will check it to make sure it's the right price.
Some of the errors we have.... Mr. Forster made a comment about, for example, receiving one item that costs $158. We may receive a box of 100 of them, but the clerk may enter into the system $158 for that box, so we have to have a system that can spot that and make the correction. This is what we are working on right now.