Finance committee  The short answer is yes. That's a predictable answer, I appreciate, but I sincerely believe it is the case. We're talking, as I said earlier, about a back office function. This fact notwithstanding, these back office functions are required to do the direct program delivery. One of the things we've observed is that it's taking a considerable amount of time to process some of our transactions, particularly now....

Finance committee  We are both entitled and obliged on those approaches. Sometimes we're winners and sometimes we're losers from those approaches. That is to say, we are occasionally the transferor and sometimes the tranferee. This particular case, as you've noted, was a Treasury Board initiative in the financial world, and we were entitled to make a request for some of those funds.

Finance committee  In the majority of cases, it's a group decision, a coordinated decision, a consensual decision. That certainly describes the relationship between us and CBSA, which is a little unique. Another example on the other side was either in supplementary estimates (B) or supplementary estimates (A) of this year; we provided a small amount of money, $100,000, to the Treasury Board Secretariat because they wanted to run a horizontal national managers' community program--

Finance committee  I'm afraid I can't answer that, sir. That's a Department of Finance supplementary estimate.

Finance committee  That's correct, yes.

Finance committee  There is a group of departments that have the SAP system as their financial system, but I believe there are only about four federal organizations that have SAP for both their financial systems and their human resources systems. What's happened with us—it was intentional—is that we have now a very integrated system, because under that SAP platform we have our financials, our human resources, our procurement, real property, all of that in an integrated manner.

Finance committee  No, what you're seeing today has nothing to do with the program side. It's all back office functions. It's basically working on improving our financial systems and working on improving our human resources systems. Consequently, it has nothing to do with any of our program initiatives other than providing the basic underlying support that allows those managers to do their management duties.

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair—and yes, it is a very brief opening statement. Basically, Mr. Chair, as you're aware, the Canada Revenue Agency is responsible for the administration of federal and certain provincial and territorial tax programs, as well as the delivery of a number of benefit payment programs.

Finance committee  Certainly. Let me start with the professional and special services. When the Treasury Board put forward this initiative, they recognized that the nature of the work was short term in nature. The result was they expected that most of the department would be having to not only use their existing employees but also bring in contracted individuals, contract IT specialists.