Environment committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for inviting us to appear before the committee today. I'm pleased to introduce Jerry DeMarco, our new commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, who joined the office of the Auditor General on February 1. Mr. DeMarco previously served as commissioner of the environment within the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario.

Public Accounts committee  Roch is quite right. We started this conversation several years ago with my predecessor Michael Ferguson and the comptroller general's office. Individuals who sit down to try to understand the public accounts are likely a little overwhelmed by 1,200 pages. If you want to encourage people to use those financial statements and find some useful information in them, then I agree that reducing some of the volumes and eliminating some of the duplication of financial statements that are available in other locations would allow those who prepare the public accounts to hopefully do so in a more timely way.

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure I implied that it would be disaggregated. The financial statements are exactly consolidated statements, bringing all of the financial information of departments, agencies, Crown corporations and federal entities into one spot. The financial statements are actually the best place to aggregate all the information together.

Public Accounts committee  It's the issue we've just been talking about. It had to do with an agreement about Hibernia and the need for proper legislative measures to be in place before payment was made under that agreement. The mechanism used by the government is one that we believe was not the most appropriate, given the inclusion of a Crown corporation in that transaction.

Public Accounts committee  I agree with you that the pandemic has definitely seen almost every Canadian interact with the government in an electronic or digital way. I think everyone across the federal public service needs to look at their own processes and see how we can move further towards digitization to support that.

Public Accounts committee  The Hibernia agreement called for an appropriate legislative measure to be put in place to ensure that parliamentary authority was received. I still stand by our view that initially that was not properly obtained, but including it in supplementary estimates (B), that measure going forward to have Parliament authorize that payment, satisfies the concern we raised.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. We issue management letter points after most of our financial audits, as throughout the course of our audits we find opportunities to improve internal controls, streamline operations or improve financial reporting practices. We take the time to make some of those recommendations and get management's commitment to a timeline and an action plan in order to continue to improve financial reporting.

Public Accounts committee  Data is used to make good, informed decisions, and data is used to develop financial statements where the government is accountable to the promises they've made. The financial statements then show you the actual result. Therefore, it's important that the data isn't compromised by an individual who shouldn't have access to it.

Public Accounts committee  At times when you're talking about a Crown corporation, the controls are all very centralized and fixes like this probably happen a lot more quickly than they would in the government itself, where sometimes central agencies manage access to main systems, hence there is a constant communication and oversight that's needed and a horizontal management of access.

Public Accounts committee  Since the transition to the Phoenix payroll system and the transformation of payroll management, we've been auditing the steps the government has taken, and I can tell you that we will continue to audit payroll and put pressure on the government. As this is a very significant expense in the financial statements of the Government of Canada, we will still be spending time on it as part of our financial audit.

Public Accounts committee  This is a question that should be put to the government. We estimate that at the current rate of processing of pending payroll intervention requests, these will not be resolved until 2022. Obviously, the government deals with new requests for intervention more efficiently, but old requests still need to be processed.

Public Accounts committee  With respect to delays in processing requests, you must ask the government how it is going to rectify this.

Public Accounts committee  I'd like to begin by thanking you for your welcome comments. I love appearing before the committee and I am very grateful for your support in all of our work. You talked about errors in payroll. I like numbers, but I don't know if I could give you a number on a satisfaction scale.

Public Accounts committee  When we talk about the nature, extent and timing, it is really the types of testing that we will do. As you mentioned, there is an increased amount of spending, so we definitely see that being a larger bucket of money that we will have to figure out how to audit. Our financial audits are done in a very tight time frame, with really close collaboration with all of the departments.

Public Accounts committee  No, not at all. Financial statement audits are actually completed and wrapped up very quickly after year-end. As we saw in 2019-20, between the extra time that the departments and agencies and our audit needed, the audit was only delayed by about five or six weeks, and I don't anticipate that it would be anything bigger than that in the coming year.