Thank you for your question.
As the member said, given the size of the Government of Canada, there will certainly be fraud.
That said, the third volume of the Public Accounts of Canada contains information on the loss of public funds.
That table is the losses that we are aware of. The bigger question is whether there are losses that we're not aware of. That's an impossible question to answer.
What I would tell you is that over the years we have shifted the balance between prevention and detection. In the past, we spent a lot more time auditing, detecting fraud after the fact. We have shifted with a new policy on internal control; I'm going to say it was about five years ago. Departments have to do an ongoing assessment of their internal controls, which includes risk of fraud.
I think one of the questions in this audit is whether that link to fraud and internal controls is explicit enough, or do we have more to do from a policy perspective? That's one of the questions that this audit has us thinking about.