Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good day to you and to members of the committee. Thank you very much for the invitation to appear before this committee to discuss the Public Accounts of Canada. I am pleased to be here in my new role as Comptroller General of Canada. With me are two memb

Public Accounts committee  Certainly.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. As you noted, essentially the appropriation sets out an upper limit to spending and directs some general purposes to which the spending is meant to apply. Typically, I think the government does a fairly good job of planning to spend that money, but from tim

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask my colleague, Mr. Matthews, to respond.

Public Accounts committee  I think it's fair to say that the general approach to budgeting and resource allocation in the government is to focus on the programs, to make sure that spending is for appropriate purposes and directed at useful ends. The choice of particular business inputs, whether it's profes

Public Accounts committee  I think central to your question was your observation on the reporting of losses. What I'd like to say about that is we see each year there's a certain level of loss reported that occurs in government. Again, there are a variety of reasons, some of them are accidental, some of th

Public Accounts committee  Right.

Public Accounts committee  Although the amount appears as a single line item in the consolidated financial statements, the expenditures are in fact made across the government in many departments and in respect of many different programs. In each case, it would be the managers of those programs who would ne

Public Accounts committee  They're large numbers, but there's not any particular reason to be concerned with that business input as opposed to any other. You would have to look at the results obtained from those expenditures. They may very well have been the best way to get value for money. It would have b

Public Accounts committee  A number of countries have had experience with it. We've read with interest a report put out by the OECD, and it indicated there were mixed reviews, you might say, specifically with the use of accrual appropriations. I recently received a report from the CICA in Canada, and it

Public Accounts committee  What I would say is that hiring consultants can provide value for money. There are many cases where you need a specialized expertise for a short period of time, and it simply makes more sense to acquire as much of it as you need rather than to try to put someone on staff permanen

Public Accounts committee  I think this is a situation in which the question would best be posed to the organization.

Public Accounts committee  I think these questions are going to have to be posed to the organizations.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Rochon spoke to this a little earlier. Obviously, against a trend of growing GDP and in the long term a growing economy, we have been successful in keeping a tight grip on government spending, and the manner in which it has been financed has been prudent.

Public Accounts committee  What I'd like to point out is that the purpose of this meeting, of course, has been to review the government's financial statements. It kind of points us to the pinnacle, the end of the road, one of the most visible outputs perhaps of the government's financial management system.