I'll take that again.
From a chief information officer perspective, we have launched a directive on digital talent. It stands to reason that there is a significant talent deficit in technology, in both the private and public sectors, and the federal public service is obviously included in that.
What we've done is put in place a directive that hopefully will strengthen the way we collect data and centralize guidance on digital talent sources. We want to improve interdepartmental coordination on that. We want to augment government-wide tools and services. We've introduced the GC digital talent platform, for example.
This directive on digital talent will, for example, require managers seeking contract services to complete a digital services contracting questionnaire. If they want to use these talent augmentation contracts in IT, they will have to check in with us and provide justification. We're trying to imbue some discipline. At the same time, though, we can't ignore the fact that we're still going to need these contracts to acquire specialized expertise to temporarily augment our workforce to keep delivering on many projects.
In this particular case, I think I would agree with the Auditor General that it stands to reason that we needed to rely on some of these contractors to get this application up and running, but as the application was developed and put into play, it would have been expected, particularly going forward, that we rely on the employees under the CIO within CBSA and the Public Health Agency to run it.