Finance committee  Well, in the beginning we are consulted on whether or not it is doable in the broad sense: Can I build a house on that piece of land?

Finance committee  That's a Treasury Board initiative that I believe was announced in the 2006 budget. They wanted to ensure that departments and agencies across the government improved the interoperability of their financial systems in the sense that when you wanted to add up numbers across departments, if every department was using uniquely tailored systems, it became much more difficult to do those aggregations.

Finance committee  That payment is sort of a partner arrangement with the child tax benefit program. Under the child tax benefit program, parents get a tax credit through the tax system, so they get, effectively, a reduction in what they owe in taxes every year. For children who are under the care of an institution or in foster care, this program provides the same level of support for those children, in those circumstances, as the child tax benefit program does.

Finance committee  It's because of our parentage, in the sense that we were both born from the same organization. In the early 1990s—this will be short—we, Customs and Tax, were integrated. We spent an awful lot of time over a decade integrating our IT systems. Early in the decade, in 2003, after the terrorist attack, the decision was made that we would move Customs over to become part of Public Safety.

Finance committee  Yes, it was.

Finance committee  It was purely and simply because I didn't recognize the name of the activity you were describing. We have a tendency in the agency to have our own names for these projects, so we may be doing this but under our own different name.

Finance committee  This particular initiative is not. I would have known, if it were. Are we participating in other aspects? We do participate with Public Works on a large number of Public Works-led projects. What's underlying here is another example, however, of an integrated IT service. We do provide to CBSA IT services.

Finance committee  It's not quite everything, but an amount of this has been spent. We did do some risk management on this project.

Finance committee  At the current time, we're doing an integrated revenue collection system, for example, which is allowing us to integrate the revenue collection process. Previously our revenue collection activity tended to be a little bit too vertical. We would look at a taxpayer's account and their T1 return, make some phone calls to them about what they owe us, and hang up the phone.

Finance committee  We still have these IT contractors working and we're still building the software, so I can't give you a percentage number as to how much of this $6.3 million is still to be spent this year, but in relative terms it's probably somewhere around one-twelfth, or something in that range.

Finance committee  We could say no, and we have said no in some cases. If we feel we have value.... For example, in the example I mentioned, our managers are going to be participating in those fora as well, so there's value for us. Because of our board of management structure in particular, we have to ensure that as we're contributing money to another department, there's value back to the Canada Revenue Agency.

Finance committee  That's correct, yes.

Finance committee  That's probably not early enough, because in October the main estimates start locking in, so you'd have to have the budget in, unfortunately, much.... Take the budget that just came down on March 4. We're now working up what we see as the cost of implementing that budget. We'd be expecting to see a Treasury Board submission in May or June, so you can see that from budget day to when we know what the hard numbers are is at least two or three months.

Finance committee  The answer, again briefly, would be yes, but at what cost? We've been recently reviewed and evaluated by the Office of the Auditor General with respect to our investment decision-making. That audit report came out extremely positive, complimenting the agency on the rigour in the information system it uses to determine its investments.

Finance committee  --and we had to transfer money over to the Treasury Board for that. That was a little...no doubt, when you get that call from Treasury Board, you can feel the hand on your arm, twisting it a little bit.