Like several organizations and a good part of the public service, for the most part our employees have been working remotely since March. That brings about the need to adapt to so many different ways of working. Coaching and mentoring employees is different in a virtual world. Accessing the entities that we audit and the information they need to provide in order for us to do our audits is different, not only for us but also for folks in the public service.
How have we been able to maintain our work? At first, I think, it was a little difficult. We needed to find the right collaboration tool and the right ways to have conversations with public servants that are sometimes protected. We needed to find creative ways to find audit evidence, because we might not have access to the traditional information that we would normally have been looking at in our financial audits and our performance audits.
When it comes to the work that we're now doing on the COVID response, I think the biggest impact is capacity, both in the departments and within our office. As you can imagine, the Public Health Agency, Health Canada and ESDC are departments that are key in providing COVID response measures to Canadians. That was in addition to their regular work. Then you add the demands of an audit.
What we're seeing is that it's taking us a lot longer to deliver audits. We are mostly motivated by the desire to find the right balance with departments as they provide much-needed assistance to Canadians and try to help us deliver on our mandate, which is to provide some reports to Parliament to hold government to account.