Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the Auditor General for being here again today. Welcome back.
I want to pick up on some of the comments. We've spoken about the budget. Different members have raised this. The expenditures for the office went from $87.6 million to $114 million. I'm looking here at the tables that were provided to us. The number of employees increased by about 180 employees. The number of audits that are to be tabled, as you get onboarded and ramped up, is obviously something, but I want to speak to the efficacy—Mr. Lawrence was raising this as well—and the follow-up that I believe is lacking.
I want to make sure that perhaps.... Of those increased resources, how much is really going to following up on some of the reports that have already been done and the recommendations that have been given, to make sure that departments are actually doing what they said they were going to do?
I want to give an example, if I could, through the recent correspondence we've received from Indigenous Services Canada regarding their progress on the Auditor General's report in 2018. Recommendation two talks about the negotiation of regional education agreements. In the report that public accounts did in 2018, it concluded that “Indigenous Services Canada has not satisfactorily measured Canada’s progress in closing the socio-economic gaps between on-reserve First Nations people and other Canadians, that it has not adequately reported on this progress, and that it has not made proper use of data to improve education programs”. That was back in 2018.
We recently received correspondence from the department, through the chair, that says they're still unable at this point to finalize some of these numbers, and they're asking to have until March 2023. That's five years after this original report that criticized them for not being able to do reporting properly and use data properly. It's taken five years to put some of these reports together.
I'm wondering if you could speak about the teeth you have and the staffing resources you're dedicating to following up with these departments and perhaps being a bit more assertive, saying to the department, “Excuse me; this is unacceptable that it's taking five years and a scathing report to get certain key aspects back.”