Public Accounts committee  The $300 million costs, I will say again, were the foundation costs. We also need to talk about the costs that would happen going forward, year by year. They are two different kinds of costs--

Public Accounts committee  I think I would agree with that characterization of what I said. You summed it up very succinctly. I think I was trying to say the same thing.

Public Accounts committee  In 2004 the part that would have been the same is of course the audit of the summary of financial statements of the Government of Canada. What is new is the departmental financial statements, now the disclosures around internal control. There is also a strengthened internal audit.

Public Accounts committee  First of all, the original statement talked about controls-based audits, and that was done on purpose, because we had a goal to cause controls to be improved. Audits don't have to be controls-based. There are other ways to audit, so in a sense you could say that an audit could take place at any time.

Public Accounts committee  That was a one-time cost.

Public Accounts committee  Well, we just heard from Mr. Wiersema that the cost of doing the Justice audit represented about 1,900 additional hours over what the Auditor General would have done normally for the consolidated audit. My earlier guess, and it's nothing more than that, because we didn't actually check with the Department of Justice on this, would be that there would be at least a one-for-one time investment on the part of the department for that.

Public Accounts committee  Not at all.

Public Accounts committee  The first point to make--I know I made this point last time, and I'm going to make it again--is that we are in this discussion treating the audit of the consolidated financial statements of the Government of Canada as if there was virtually no benefit, and that we had to therefore supplement that with these departmental statements.

Public Accounts committee  If I may, Chair, I think essentially all of the costs would have been the costs of the government, first of all, and they all would have been costs related to the remediation of internal control. None of it would have been related to the annual audit costs, as I tried to distinguish with respect to the earlier question.

Public Accounts committee  No, I think the secretary gave a very good example of what the disclosures would be like in a typical department. You had asked what we would see from, say, the three largest departments. Well, obviously the actual content would be different in terms of the situations that each one faced.

Public Accounts committee  The incremental cost would be now the annual cost of each and every year doing the work.

Public Accounts committee  We don't have that number. The number that we computed originally was to do the foundational work to achieve the state of readiness, not the annual cost to them to do the work on an ongoing basis.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, I think I touched on this point at the last hearing, but essentially to repeat, the original estimate of $300 million was to remediate the internal controls. It was basically to bring the departments up to a state such that the controls would be satisfactory for the Auditor General to choose a controls-based audit as opposed to a substantive-based audit.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. At the meeting of October 21, I summarized the suite of Treasury Board policies that I believe will be effective in bringing about improved financial management in the federal government, and in particular improved systems of internal control. I would like to reiterate the point just made by the secretary, that members may see for themselves the results of one of those policy changes.

Public Accounts committee  On the cost, as I think my colleague pointed out, much of that sum was for a certain amount of upfront work to bring us to a certain state. That work was being done in the departments. That work has gone on, so some amount out of that total would have been expended for those purposes by now.