I'll talk about one thing that you have taken a step into, first of all, then perhaps something else as well.
This committee has now held a hearing with a department a second time, bringing them back about a year or a year and a half afterward to talk about an audit that had been done before. I think that sends a good message throughout the whole system, a message that this committee is serious about departments actually fixing the problems that we see. That's something that has already started, and I would encourage the committee to continue to do that. I think that's an important message for the system.
In terms of the message I delivered today, here is part of what I'm trying to get at. We will do an audit. We will identify some issues. We'll make recommendations. The department will say, “Yes, we will deal with those”, and they may very well go back and deal with them, but we won't really know whether they have or how well they've done it until we come back and do a follow-up audit, but they may very well do that.
However, I guess what concerns me is.... I'll take the example of the call centre audit with the CRA. The message in that audit, the overall high-level message in that audit, is not very different from the message we delivered a few years ago about veterans trying to get access to mental health services. I guess what concerns me when I'm talking about the whole-of-government level is that it almost seems departments are only concerned about audits we do about them. They should also be looking at audits that we do about other departments and programs in order to figure out what they should be doing in their programs to get them to a good place, so that when I do come in here with an audit on their programs, I can say, “Yes, they're delivering this program and they seem to be trying to understand the program from the point of view of the citizen.”
I think it's very important that departments learn from the audits of others. Perhaps one thing the committee could think about doing is some sort of overall summary report, perhaps, of some of the common issues that have come out from a number of different reports and things that departments should be learning from a number of audits. What are those common-theme things? Departments should be paying attention to those more.
Then if we come back with an audit that says they haven't done it, the committee will be in the position to say, “Look, we've even given you a bit of a road map for the types of things you should be learning from audits done on other departments.”
Obviously, they're not doing that on their own, so they might need a little bit of help. Maybe that's a role the committee could play.