I certainly hope that you can find a way to live up to that, because what we're seeing now is completely unacceptable.
I probably will have some more questions for you, Mr. Ledwell, but I do want to gather a bit more information from the Auditor General.
I don't know if it's appropriate to ask questions of Mr. Swales—I understand that you were the one working on the audit directly—but I would be happy to do that. If the Auditor General herself wishes to answer, that's fine, too.
What we're hearing—over the last seven years in particular—is that this department has failed to meet its service standards. About 16 weeks is kind of the standard that they have for processing. What you've identified here is a median of about 39 weeks. I note that that's from the point when the application is considered complete, so once there's been some back-and-forth potentially between the veteran and the workers at Veterans Affairs.
I guess what I want to ask is this: What is the actual length of time from when a veteran is submitting an application? I note in your report that you talk about something here where we're looking at probably 48 weeks being the actual length of time once we add in the amount of time that's being taken for that consideration of an application being complete. Is that correct?
What length of time, when you add that portion in, is the average processing time for a case, and what would be some of the longest times we're seeing in terms of processing? Obviously, 48 weeks or 39 weeks or anything like that is far from being acceptable. What would be some of the longest cases—