I certainly agree with the committee's challenging the department whenever we are bringing forward issues around data and data quality. The way you just posed the question very clearly sends a message. The fact that the committee is very clear that anybody who is going to be appearing here can expect to get questions about data and that you will continue to challenge it is, I think, a strong message. You need to continue to do so and to continue to reiterate this.
As to what needs to be done to actually fix the problem, the way I keep looking at it—and I think I've said this before to this committee—is to determine whether, if I look at any organization preparing a set of financial statements, the data is good enough in quality.
The quality is there such that we can produce an audit opinion on the set of financial statements. That's because the culture and the environment have been built up to put controls in systems to make sure that what's going into the data is properly captured and recorded. It's my opinion that departments don't have that culture necessarily in all of the other program support systems.
Systems that don't feed into preparing a set of financial statements don't produce a lot of financial information, but they are important perhaps for managing who has taken training or for managing how long it took to resolve a declaration.
When you're dealing with those types of program support systems, which are equally important to making sure that people are getting their values and ethics training and so are a very fundamental issue, the same level of controls isn't applied to the data being entered and to making sure that the data can be used.
The system, then, knows how to make sure that quality data gets entered into a system. The system certainly does it to an acceptable degree to produce a set of financial statements, but it doesn't always do it for the other systems. That's what needs to change. The culture needs to broaden that control-of-data mindset from financial systems only to all their other systems.