Mr. Chair, I represent the riding of Nepean, in Ottawa. I keep hearing a lot of complaints on the three practices that apparently Treasury Board has accepted that could lead to fraud. The first is contract splitting, that is, unnecessarily dividing a requirement into a number of small contracts. The second is inappropriate contract amendments, and an agreed addition to or deletion from a correction or modification of a contract that is inappropriate. The third is inappropriate sole-source contracting.
I keep hearing quite a bit from a lot of contractors, especially the small contractors, that these are quite widespread in several federal departments.
I would like to ask our deputy ministers to comment on how prevalent these practices are in the contracts awarded by the departments. That's the first question.
Also, the Auditor General also found all organizations had controls for procurement. They had systems to protect and detect fraud, but he points out that these controls were not always applied, even when they were mandated. My second question would be, how many cases have you found where the mandatory checklist was not followed? If they were found, what actions were taken against the managers?
I'll start with the deputy minister for Public Works and Government Services, Ms. Marie Lemay.