When the justice at last program came in on October 18, 2008, sort of as the first date, the department went back and reset all of the start dates on all of the outstanding claims in their system. Then they measured how long it took them to resolve that under the justice at last program. That meant the information was no longer really about when the original start date was and how long this claim had been in process.
We also mention—and there's an exhibit 6.6 just above paragraph 6.76 in that chapter—that the report from the department said that there were 136 claims, for a total settlement of $2.260 billion, when actually we found that 89 of those claims for $2.209 billion were either essentially settled under the old process, or well down the road. In fact, 28 of them had been settled and compensated before justice at last, on October 18, 2008, but the department included them as settlements under Justice at last.
If what they were supposed to be doing was letting Parliament know what the impact of this new approach, justice at last, had been, then what they should have done was to say, “Here's how many claims first came in the door under justice at last and here's what we have done with them.” Instead, they counted all of that overlap period where a lot of work had been done before, and said, “Okay, we've settled over $2 billion through the justice at last program.” The way we looked at it, we felt that they had actually settled $51 million of claims that came in through that approach.