Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I again thank the Auditor General and her team for these many very interesting reports.
It won't surprise you, but my first questions will be about the report on the Canada Emergency Business Account. I asked the president of Export Development Canada, or EDC, about this almost a year ago, in February 2024, and we now know that the information she gave me was completely wrong. Ms. Lavery was off by $150 million regarding the value of contracts awarded to Accenture and the number of calls the company was receiving. She said it was receiving 10,000 calls a day, whereas your report shows that this was probably not the case. When we study the report, we see what was reported to EDC by Accenture. However, I fully understand that there are limits to what you can do in your studies and that you didn't go and check for yourselves what was going on in the call centres.
The ArriveCAN case shocked people because, as you summed it up in one sentence, it's the worst bookkeeping you've ever seen. Now, if we look at Accenture's bookkeeping and summarize the EDC situation a bit, we see that Accenture was awarded contracts totalling $313 million, of which $209 million has already been disbursed. In several cases, you'll have noted that Accenture's people wrote the contract and determined its parameters and price. They even helped the government with procurement and awarded a contract to themselves or one of their subsidiaries. I would in fact like a little clarification on this. What was the value of this contract? Was it $36 million?