Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will take the opportunity to make a couple of contextual comments as well. I think it is important to note that this is a significant initiative, a major undertaking. In my opening statement, I said it is three times the normal volume since 1995. Being ab

Public Accounts committee  Do you want to...?

Public Accounts committee  I might ask Mr. Swales to provide some more details. We finished our audit in June 2017. At the time, what we saw was that, of the 129 organizations, 16 were not prepared to actually do the front-end loading. In essence, some of them actually laid off some of their settlement se

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We thank you for this opportunity to present the results of our audit of settlement services for Syrian refugees. As you mentioned, joining me at the table is Nicholas Swales. He is the principal responsible for this audit. In 2015, the Government of Can

Public Accounts committee  As the member pointed out, this was a point that the Auditor General has made on a number of occasions. In this particular case, we were seeing that the clock starts ticking in terms of that performance measurement metric when the appeals officer starts working on it. Then we say

Public Accounts committee  Since it was last looked at in 2004, rolling forward, are we seeing similar issues? The issues here have to do with the feedback loop that was being talked about, because sometimes you know we are getting the results of the actual objection process and those lessons learned weren

Public Accounts committee  I think the important point is to follow through now. We've heard the approach that's going to be taken. It seems to be on the right track. We're all encouraged by that. It would be necessary to make sure that those actions get carried through and that indeed the inventory goes d

Public Accounts committee  I'm very encouraged with what the commissioner has provided in his opening statement. Those seem to be the areas that we are concerned with. The communication aspect is very important because a lot of taxpayers are waiting for answers. The uncertainty doesn't help with the dynami

Public Accounts committee  That would be because we were looking at five years of information, up to March 2016. At that point we do not distinguish backlog; all the objections are in play.

Public Accounts committee  What I'm hearing from the commissioner is that they'll start with that, but the intention is to work that number down. Certainly from our perspective, the expectation would be this number should be quite a bit lower than the 180. Especially when the commissioner is considering as

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to present the results of our report on income tax objections. Joining me at the table is Jean Goulet, who is the principal responsible for the audit. This audit focused on whether the Canada Revenue Agency efficiently managed personal a

Public Accounts committee  First, I'd like to confirm and support what Mr. Pagan said. It's not the Treasury Board's responsibility to come up with the performance indicators, it is up to the lead department and the partner departments and agencies to do that. However, they have a role to provide guidance.

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to perhaps explain a little bit. My answer was a little bit long. I think what I was trying to get to was the importance of needing to get to the performance and outcome. At no point was I indicating or suggesting th

Public Accounts committee  From our perspective, I think it speaks to the importance of the collective initiatives. The dollar amounts aren't significant if you compare them with transfer payments—the scale of the Canadian operation is about a billion dollars overall—but the objectives are really important