Thank you, Mr. Chair.
That's a standard practice we have when we are doing an audit. We ask the entity to confirm that the findings were factually based. In this case, the RCMP would not agree that the findings were factually based because of their disagreement about the approach used to report statistics from the file review and the member survey. I think we just heard the commissioner mention that we said in the report that 20% of members were not able to return to work. I think the commissioner referred to the other side of that being the 80%. But really, in those statistics you have 20% who were not able to return to work, 30% who were able to return to their duties that they were doing before, and 50% who were able to return to work but had to return to other duties, not to the job they were originally doing. That can have an impact on the RCMP's staffing, because they have people they hired to do one job who go off-duty on sick leave and have to come back to another job.
I think some of these disagreements were about the way we characterized it. For example, we said that 20% were not able to return to work. We think that's the right way to characterize it. The RCMP obviously has their view on how that should be characterized. We feel that what's important here is understanding that 20% were not able to return to work, and in fact 50% had to return to reduced duties. In our view, that shows significant room for improvement on the results of this program.