Public Accounts committee  No. We've had the income tax data file for 20 years--a long time.

Public Accounts committee  Good morning, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Neil Yeates, Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, as the chair has noted. I'm joined by Elizabeth Ruddick, who is the director general of research and evaluation at CIC. I would like to thank the committee for inviting me back to speak today.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. We are working closely with provinces and territories to have a fairly detailed discussion on the relationship among the various immigration categories in our levels plan. As the Auditor General has noted, we're trying to better assess what the various contributions of those categories are.

Public Accounts committee  Very briefly, Mr. Chair, obviously we feel that the issues that have been identified by the Auditor General are critical ones. The successful operation of the immigration program is critical for Canada in terms of our future. We take our responsibilities here very seriously and will look forward to following up on this action plan very diligently.

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask Madam Deschênes to speak to the refund processing.

Public Accounts committee  Okay. Thank you.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I can add to that. On GCMS, we are monitoring the project extremely carefully, given the history we've had on it. Of course, the Office of the Auditor General does their work as well. On your second question on settlement, we are really bound by the levels plan, because we completely agree there's a limit to the number of immigrants that communities can successfully integrate and settle.

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask Madam Deschênes to speak to our work on quality assurance.

Public Accounts committee  GCMS has had a difficult history, as you've noted, Chair. There are issues around the scope of the project and the cost of the project. Whenever you have long-term IT projects, things keep changing--your environment; you go back and change the system. There have been some big lessons there about these big IT projects.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, it's certainly part of the overall puzzle. As members would know, there are many aspects to the immigration system in terms of dealing with applications and third-party consultants. As you may know, the minister has announced plans to come forward with some legislative and regulatory amendments this spring to strengthen that regime.

Public Accounts committee  I can start off, Member. You're quite right that foreign credential recognition has proven to be a very difficult set of issues to deal with. We would agree that getting a lot of the services overseas is critical here so that people can know, before they come to Canada, what the status of their credentials is likely to be.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I'm going to ask Mr. Linklater to speak to the work that's been done on the portal and so on.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much. The global case management system will basically house all of the cases that we process. It allows us to do searches, for example, on common addresses. Members may be aware of some situations where 200 people used the same address. It's been an issue in citizenship applications, and GCMS, which we've had in place for citizenship since 2004, allows us to detect that.

Public Accounts committee  I think it's been essentially having a system that has accepted a large number of applications that are way more than we've had processing capacity for and way more than we've actually set out in the annual levels plan. So you put those two things together and de facto you're going to end up with a backlog.

Public Accounts committee  I think we're finding at the moment that the levels plan we have, which we table every year in Parliament, grosso modo, is around the right level. It is supplemented with temporary foreign workers. In general, we would say yes. We'll see what happens in the future as our labour market demographics continue to change.