Thank you for the opportunity to finish what I was saying.
Our office's funding went up by $25 million. In July, we began hiring people to build our team. We have recruited a hundred or so people from across the country. A quarter of them live in places where we don't have offices. In the current remote working environment, we were able to hire people who otherwise would not have been able to work on site. My sense is that we are on the right track to meet the demand and perform more audits.
We intend to carry out more follow-up audits than we had previously and to conduct other audits related to the pandemic as well as other key issues. We are in the midst of training the people we've hired, and once the onboarding is complete, you will see an increase in the number of audits we submit to the government.
As far as departments go, our experience has been that they want to co-operate with our office, but a number of them lack the necessary time and resources. Department staff assigned to support us in our audit work are also tasked with providing services during the pandemic. We have received a few requests to postpone audits, which we decided to grant, but we are turning our attention to other important issues.