From what I've seen over the last five years, I think what ends up happening.... In some ways, we have probably partly contributed to this, because what we do in a number of our audits is tell departments that they should have ways of measuring whether they have success in their programs. What actually happens, I think, is that a lot of times government departments put in place measures to measure their performance, but they put in place a measure around something that's easy to measure. They don't put something in place that measures the process from beginning to end, taking into account the experience of the citizen; they measure a piece of the process that's easy to measure.
Again, if you look at the Canada Revenue Agency audit on income tax objections, you'll see that they do track how much time their agents have to spend on a file on an income tax objection. In fact, you can see in the audit that they set standards for it. The standards are for their agent to work on a file anywhere from four hours for the easiest files to 28 hours for the most complex files. They monitor how much time the agent is spending, but this is totally disproportionate to what the individual citizen is going through. On those most complex files, where they say that the standard for their agent is 28 hours, we said that the taxpayer could be waiting over 900 days to get an answer. They are not measuring the process from the point of view of how long this person is waiting. Yes, they are measuring a little piece of the process to help them understand what's going on there, but it's not getting them to realize the fact that we are making people wait around too long for these decisions, and we need to figure out how to do a better job on that.