Good morning Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Public Accounts of Canada for 2016-17. As you said, with me today is Diane Peressini.
The public accounts include the audited consolidated financial statements for 2016-17 fiscal year, which ended on March 31, 2017, in addition to other unaudited financial information.
Mr. Chair, I am pleased to note that, for the 19th consecutive year, the Auditor General has issued an unmodified audit opinion on these financial statements. A great deal of work goes into these financial statements, which are prepared under the joint direction of the Minister of Finance, the President of the Treasury Board, and the Receiver General for Canada. I would like to recognize the excellent work of the financial community across the Government of Canada in realizing these results.
They deserve much of the credit for the fact the government's consolidated financial statements are consistently presented fairly every year.
I would also like to thank the Office of the Auditor General for their continued cooperation and assistance.
Mr. Chair, I would also like to highlight a recent report issued by the OECD on rationalizing government fiscal reporting. The report notes that Canada's fiscal reporting framework employs many best practices, with a notable feature being Canada's use of websites, and in particular the Treasury Board Secretariat's InfoBase, to give access to a wide set of information. That being said, based on best practices noted in the reports and in other countries, I believe there is more we could do to rationalize fiscal reporting. If it is of interest to members of the committee, I would be pleased to discuss this report.
Mr. Chair, I do have a short deck, which I am happy to walk the committee through, if it is of interest, to provide some background on the public accounts of Canada. If you would like me to do that, I'll just take your guidance in terms of how much time you want me to spend on that, and then move us along as need be.
Before doing that, I have two quick things. As already mentioned, going through the Public Accounts of Canada, the page numbers
in English and French are very different,
so we will be pausing if members have questions on specific page numbers to find the equivalent in English and in French so all can follow along. We would like to be a little disciplined on that, and we have staff here who can help us with that.
Finally, to draw your attention, Mr. Chair, an email was sent to the committee clerk yesterday, as is normal practice, highlighting any errors in the public accounts that we are aware of before this meeting. There are three. They are all in volume II of Public Accounts, and they all relate to the same topic. I would like to explain why that is.
In volume II, we are providing additional information this year, for the first time. Clearly, while it's good information, we have a few wrinkles to iron out in terms of the quality of that information. All three relate to this new information on lapses. It is additional information we have not provided before. Three departments have come forward to let us know about this. It's the second year we've done this, but there are some wrinkles we still have to iron out, so I do apologize for that.