Public Accounts committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair, I am pleased to be here to present the findings of our recent audit reports that were tabled in the House on Tuesday. They include five performance audits of government programs or activities and four special examination reports of Crown corporations. I a

Public Accounts committee  That is something that we could consider. That is not the current practice, but we are always listening for ways to become even more helpful to the committee and to the House.

Public Accounts committee  There are some legal aspects that frame how we have to conduct business and reporting, but we could.... At times we are looking at—while respecting, obviously, the legislation—where there is room for adjustment in the mode of continuous improvement. We're considering those aspect

Public Accounts committee  Yes, indeed. We always welcome the input of the committee, from MPs, from the public. Obviously, to protect our independence, we make the ultimate decision about what we audit. However, input from any source is always more than welcome.

Public Accounts committee  I'll speak to two elements that we noted during the audit: one is the technology side. As you mentioned, Shared Services Canada has a project where, out of 221 call centres, they've upgraded, modernized, eight of them. For the 213 remaining ones, there's no plan in place yet.

Public Accounts committee  We found during that audit that there are some challenges around the systems, but they're challenges about systems not talking to each other and quality assurance of what you input in the system. When, let's say during a hearing, they use that information, if the information is n

Public Accounts committee  They started a project some years ago whereby they've acquired more carbines. Yes, they have more, and we report on that, but they have not established a national standard. Our recommendation is that they determine exactly how many they should have, to make sure that all agents w

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask Monsieur Le Goff to take you through that process.

Public Accounts committee  What Mr. Le Goff is referring to is in the auditor's report. We refer to the fact... we noted there was not enough audit work done by CBSA. We give some illustrations. I'll just use one. They've done some audit work where the declared value of the package was $800,000. When they

Public Accounts committee  Recognizing that I'm kind of repeating myself, that's the message we conveyed to the agency.

Public Accounts committee  They need to do more audit work to have assurance that the values declared for the packages are accurate, and accordingly, that the taxes are aligned to the real value of the packages. They need to do more audit work to get that assurance themselves.

Public Accounts committee  Our conclusion was that officers don't always have the equipment and the training they need to protect themselves and protect the public. We're talking about hard body armour and we're talking about carbines. We refer in the report to having to do better on managing a project. W

Public Accounts committee  There were two perspectives here. One is that there is a review being done on campaigns. The decision to go with the independent external reviewer is anchored in a dollar threshold—a $500,000 campaign goes to an external review. We are of the view, especially in these days with

Public Accounts committee  No, the only way you can manage a function like that is to adopt a new file, so you can have somebody reviewing the files, supervising the work, planning the work and demonstrating that it's being done properly.

Public Accounts committee  That is correct. Shared Services Canada launched a call centre modernization project 5 years ago, but has realized since that it would be more complicated and costly than originally planned. To this day, the organization has modernized 8 call centres, but there are still 213 for