Public Accounts committee  This is the largest financial audit that our office undertakes. As you can imagine, auditing the whole of the Government of Canada is a large endeavour. In prior years, we would have seen our audit run anywhere from about 44,000 hours to a little less than 33,000, so we did see this year being a little bit more than a typical year, but less than the first few years when we had to deal with the increase in work when the Phoenix pay system first rolled out.

Public Accounts committee  We audit the government's financial statements and compare them to generally accepted accounting principles that are applied to the public sector. We look to ensure that they are fairly stated and that they are free of errors that would impact the user's decision. A clean opinion basically means that you can rely on the information in the financial statements.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our audit of the Government of Canada's consolidated financial statements for the 2019-20 fiscal year. With me are Chantale Perreault and Étienne Matte, financial audit principals. The government's financial statements are one of its key accountability documents.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, what we found in our audit was that there was an inequality if you were a foreign vendor versus a Canadian vendor. The measures that have been proposed are in line with the recommendations of the OECD.

Public Accounts committee  I'm going to ask Philippe Le Goff, who led that audit, to answer that question. As you can appreciate, this study was launched and completed well before my appointment—

Public Accounts committee  —and I don't think I asked all those details, so I'm going to ask Philippe for an answer.

Public Accounts committee  That's also what I understood. It's a statement of intent, which will depend on what is voted in Parliament. The confirmation will also be included in the supplementary estimates. If the vote occurs in February, we'll receive this money in March. And of course it should not be forgotten that the fiscal year ends in March.

Public Accounts committee  Good morning. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to continue our dialogue on the taxation of e-commerce. I will leave most of my time to the committee members for questions. I simply want to state that the government's proposals outlined in its fall economic statement are, in our view, in line with the recommendations of the OECD, which are the best practices or actions taken by other countries.

Public Accounts committee  We were pleased to see our funding included in the economic statement released earlier this week. I very much appreciate the committee's support as well as the finance committee's support for us to obtain our funding. Obviously now we look to the supplementary estimates (C) and Parliament's vote on that, but including our funding in the economic statement provides us with the clarity that we need in order to move forward to start rebuilding our performance audit practice and modernizing our office.

Public Accounts committee  Well, it's the sort of information I would encourage them to gather and analyze in order to be able to make recommendations for any changes that might be needed to the program.

Public Accounts committee  That's an excellent question. I'm not sure I'm the best person to find that result. I guess I would want to start, however, with understanding why individuals who are in the repayment assistance program are perhaps unable to make the payments, whether they be reduced or not. Our audit did note that in 2019 about half of the individuals in the repayment assistance program had not made any payments in four years, so perhaps it's the design of the program.

Public Accounts committee  No, it was a general proposal that stemmed from our finding that there were individuals who had revenue higher than the threshold and were admitted into the repayment assistance program, recognizing that having that historical information is just one piece of information you need and that, together, CRA and ESDC should share the information they need to make the best well-informed decision about who should be admitted and whether or not they should be given reduced payments.

Public Accounts committee  I'm actually looking to start some work in perhaps a year or so that looks at the protection of information on the cloud. Like any organization, the federal government is subject to people who try to access our data sets, our servers with bad intentions, so I do think it's important that we take the time to ensure that taxpayers' information is protected from external hackers and also follows the rules of the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. There is a threshold for the income that a borrower can have to qualify for the repayment assistance plan. The department had noticed, as we did later on, that a number of borrowers had incomes above the threshold. There was a lack of information on that.

Public Accounts committee  It is difficult to answer that question. Determining who runs a student loan program is really a political matter. I feel that ESDC could benefit from more information in order to understand why borrowers in the repayment assistance plan are not paying their loans back. It would involve doing a more in-depth evaluation of the program, as well as the way in which it interacts with the Canada education savings program.