Public Accounts committee  Can I come back, sir, to something from earlier?

Public Accounts committee  When the invoice came in from Great-West Life, we had no alternative but to pay it. That work was done in good faith by Great-West Life, signed by an officer of the RCMP. So we had no choice. But after we did that, then we went in and changed the transactions accordingly. Then we wrote Great-West Life to get a refund.

Public Accounts committee  Sir, if I had known this was happening, I would have taken that authority away a lot earlier. When my people were in there, they were in there to make sure that any contract done within the RCMP was properly done. But a contract with CAC--HR had the full authority to go to CAC.

Public Accounts committee  First of all, we don't have resources to check every transaction that happens. We have a $4 billion budget in the RCMP. We have millions of transactions. We have millions of lines of coding. Everything is based on trust, risk, and organization. In this place we had an organization.

Public Accounts committee  It is very complicated, and I do not have the number here. I will provide it to you.

Public Accounts committee  When you take somebody's authority away, it's a pretty serious thing.

Public Accounts committee  For the year 2005-06, the administrative cost for pensions was of $11,798,000.

Public Accounts committee  It's an increase. But I want to explain why. We know that all the moneys for the pension are now invested by the investment pension board. The return last year was 17%. In the past, it would have been approximately 8% for the long-term bonds. In order to make that 17%, we had to pay the investment board $5.7 million, but they returned nearly three times what they would have returned had it been government bonds.

Public Accounts committee  We did a report and we took away his contracting authority. The answer is no, we didn't ask that he be removed.

Public Accounts committee  Sir, I didn't say it was a simple transaction. Basically, what I said was—

Public Accounts committee  Well, I beg to differ. Anyway, what happened here is that the RCMP doesn't have a mandate to charge insurance administration—

Public Accounts committee  I can't answer this in just a yes or no fashion. What I have to say here is that, in HR, they decided, through the insurance committee, that they would charge part of the insurance to the pension plan, without telling anybody.

Public Accounts committee  Without telling anybody.

Public Accounts committee  That's right.

Public Accounts committee  If they had told me, I would not have allowed it.