Mr. Speaker, one of the challenges I have with this motion is that it asks for a forensic audit. A forensic audit is an examination of an organization's or individual's economic affairs, resulting in a report designed especially for use in a court of law. It is ridiculous that the opposition would bring forward a motion that speaks to having to do something in a court of law.
Forensic accountants may be involved in recovering proceeds of crime and in relation to confiscation proceedings concerning actual or assumed proceeds of crime.
The NDP is talking about crime. However, no crime has occurred. The Auditor General has been very clear in terms of what he stated. Specific to reporting, one of his quotes is that the departments are responsible for accounting and reporting their spending through the Public Accounts of Canada. He says, “The spending within the departments would have undergone normal control procedures in those departments; so there are internal controls in departments about spending and they would go through all of those normal processes. We didn't identify anything that would cause us to say that we felt that anything was going on outside of those processes”.
To ask for a forensic audit is unbelievable.