Public Accounts committee  I can't speak to all of the different pieces of information that we've seen. Again, the report is a synthesis of all of the evidence that we gathered. As for specific types of documents or conversations, I don't have all of those details. That's what the report is supposed to do.

Public Accounts committee  Again, that's not something I can comment on. In this particular project, it was the three Phoenix executives who had the responsibility for making the decisions. Any external contractors didn't have any authority to say, “No, this isn't going ahead.” It was the three Phoenix executives who had that authority.

Public Accounts committee  We're not doing any audits right now of any other systems, but in my message, I did indicate that I am very concerned that there will be another “incomprehensible failure” at some point in the future. I don't think that just putting in some additional rules or policies is going to be sufficient to make sure that this type of failure is avoided in the future.

Public Accounts committee  I can't speak to any specific situations outside of what we have in our audits. We do have audit information on a number of different issues. That's not something that we have audited. Again, I would go back to the message that I indicated. It's very important, I believe, to look to the core reasons that we end up with incomprehensible failures, to make sure they don't happen on any future project.

Public Accounts committee  Again, that's not something I can comment on. I don't have any information on that.

Public Accounts committee  Again, as I think was talked about earlier on, the original decision point of cutting back on the functionality of the system really caused a lot of the problems, and things needed to be resolved at that point. It all started to build from there. If the project had been managed the right way all along, you would have hoped that would have been identified much earlier, rather than to say at the last minute, “well I guess we'd better not launch this”.

Public Accounts committee  Again, it's impossible to say. Of course, it's a decision they did not make. There's no documentation of something they decided not to do. That would all have been through conversations. There's no way for us to know exactly why they decided not to go back. Our point is, even if they decided not to go back for more money, they should have gone back to say, “Now this project will not deliver the savings it was supposed to deliver.”

Public Accounts committee  Again, there's no way for us to know who would have been involved in making the decision not to go back and ask for more money.

Public Accounts committee  Again, that would be a decision for the committee, depending on what it wants to do. The audit can only go so far. This was a regular performance audit on the decisions that were made and the way the project was managed. All we can do is follow the trail of decisions. There's nothing that explains why they decided not to go back and ask for more money.

Public Accounts committee  I think the important thing to remember is that, over this time period, three different people served in the role of deputy minister of that department. The reference that I made in my opening statement was to the briefing that the executives made to the deputy minister who was in place at the time of the decision to launch.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, the only thing I can say is, in the course of these audits, we identify these issues. The departments will come back and say that they are going to do something. They will always agree with our recommendations. They say they're going to implement something, but too often, when we go back and do another follow-up audit, we find that they haven't done it.

Public Accounts committee  There's no way I can explain that. The department is going to have to explain that. We are as disappointed as anybody when we see that issues that we raised many years ago aren't followed up on. It's not just issues that we raise, but issues that come out of other reports, as I mentioned in those other types of areas.

Public Accounts committee  There's no way for us to know that. All we know is that the department did not go back to Treasury Board. In our opinion, they should have gone back to Treasury Board, either to ask for more money or to tell Treasury Board they'd had to cut back on the functionality of the system, and that consequently the system would not be able to produce the $70-million-a-year savings they had originally said it would.

Public Accounts committee  Again, I think the audit certainly did point out the fact that there has not been improvement in the education outcomes of first nations on-reserve students, and we've been doing audits in this area for almost 20 years. The thing I would want to add to what you said is that literacy is one of the most important things.

Public Accounts committee  The premise of this whole audit was that governments often talk about the need to close the socio-economic gap that exists between on-reserve first nations people in particular, and other Canadians. The first thing we identified was that they aren't measuring what that socio-economic gap is.