Sure.
First of all, the financial statement audit is the opinion on the public accounts. The Auditor General's office spends thousands of hours doing that. It's a large effort. It's the combination of everything under the government's control. It's a huge document.
That's the government's.... The government owns that public accounts document. The audit opinion is just placed on the top—after all of the Auditor General's work—saying that you can rely on it. One thing Canada can be very proud of is that there has been what we call in the audit world a “clean audit” opinion on the financial statements for...I think forever. I can't recall anything in the past. That means there's nothing they need to tell you to adjust in order to use those statements.
They also come across things in the process of doing those audits. That's put into a document that they label.... The name has changed over the years, but it's a commentary on those public accounts. You'll get that report every year from the Auditor General's office.
The performance audits are the bundle that they issue periodically. They're several chapters. They're large. They are independently selected and the criteria are developed by the office independently, depending on what they are choosing to look at. It used to be called value-for-money auditing. The terminology now is “performance audit”. There are Canadian standards for those assurance engagements. The audit office follows all of that good practice.
It's often referred to as looking at economy, efficiency and effectiveness. It does get into the environment. Were the intended results achieved? It's very broad in nature. It could be on any subject. They will look into a particular area that could be around risk management, compliance or, as I mentioned, climate change and so on.
It does not assess the merits of policies. This is consistent with the public accounts committee's role, as this is not a committee for policy discussion. Once the policy has been put in place, it looks at whether it has been administered appropriately. They will select an aspect of that. They are only looking at a selection through the year.
In addition to the performance audits, financial statement audits and the action plans that ministries or organizations that have been audited must provide to the committee to tell where they are in following up with the recommendations made by the Auditor General, the Auditor General will also select a few to re-audit. They will produce a follow-up audit. It's not the same as the original audit. It's shorter and it gets a little bit more into the risk areas that they don't think were addressed. They will go into those.
They also do special examinations on Crown corporations. Again, it's through a cycle. They will produce a report to the committee as a result of those special examinations.
Those are the four different types you'll get: commentary on financial statement audits; the financial statement audits themselves, which are attached to the statements; performance audit reports, which is what you will primarily be examining; and special examinations. Follow-up audit reports are just performance audits of another aspect.