Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will refer to the Auditor General's Report 7, Operating and Maintenance Support for Military Equipment, National Defence, but before I go there, I want to go back to Mr. Forster.
Sir, I owned a small contracting company. There's a simple way to track your costs. You said it's very difficult and complex to track actual cost and allocate it to something. In my era, being the dinosaur that I am, it was called time sheets. Every one of my employees filled them out—two hours spent replacing the toilet; three hours spent doing trim work to the door. Then those were brought back to the office, and we input them into our database of the costing for that job to know at the end of the job what we had spent against how we had costed the job, and whether we had made money or lost money on that job. That was in the days before a lot of sophistication.
I watch people doing work for me these days. The plumber or the carpenter brings one of these in. There's a program. They mark in the number of hours they do on a particular project. Some of these companies have codes for the type of work it is. It goes into a database. It gets funnelled through an electronic system. There's no more transcribing in the office; it saves staff inside transcribing into the costing file, the paper hard copy. I believe this is how it's done today, although I haven't been in the business since 1996.
That said, why is it so complicated?