Agriculture committee  I will start with the options question. We did actually finish the initial payments. However, as we were processing the initial payments we found about 500 participants who had not met their renewal obligations. In order to not disqualify them, we went back to them and gave them

Agriculture committee  It was never intended to be 100%, even in the actual program. The program was always designed as a two-year program, in which the first year was 100%, the second year was no more than up to 75%. That was clear right in the guidelines. We did not want it to be a consistent...it

Agriculture committee  Basically it was augmented—

Agriculture committee  It was at 25%. As soon as we finish processing the initial payments, only then will we be able to know what the percentage will be for...but there is money left for the final. We just don't know what the percentage will be until we're finished processing the last 500 that came in

Public Accounts committee  Yes. For example, if an error was made on a 2003 or 2004 CAIS and we processed the CITY payments using those, we'd go back and reprocess all the CITY payments that used that data.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that is one of the key areas in terms of the continuous improvements. As those field audits are finding out what's happening, that is going to help fix some of the error rates. In addition, though, those field audits are anticipated to have a higher adjustment rate because t

Public Accounts committee  Yes, and there were two points. One was the service standards. We have negotiated across all administrations on a common service standard. We've just finished putting the systems in place and are about to start reporting on it. The other one was in terms of taking a look at the

Public Accounts committee  When they are hired, our staff are offered very extensive training on the applications. In addition, they are mentored by a seasoned employee, so that we go through the work with them. You talk about seasonal employees, but not everybody is seasonal. We do have some full-time e

Public Accounts committee  The general application is a PM1 application.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, it's a clear conflict of interest.

Public Accounts committee  Actually, in terms of business risk management tools, the producers will tell you themselves that they prefer to get their returns from the markets. So in terms of diversifying and getting it that way, it works. However, the four programs now affect different types of need. For

Public Accounts committee  The program is whole farm. So even if there were five different commodities, we'd still—

Public Accounts committee  It is whole farm.

Public Accounts committee  We are actually about to start a review of the one-page application form to see if it did help and if it made it a lot easier. In addition, we did do a cross-comparative survey across all of our programs, including the CAIS program last year, to ask producers exactly how they fou

Public Accounts committee  Absolutely.