Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, there have been a couple of questions asked about whether it's acceptable to paper-over contracts for former public servants, and so on, and I was looking for the quote from the Treasury Board contracting rules. What they say about this is

Public Accounts committee  No, I'm speculating. His staff would have said to him, look, these guys at Public Works want to separate this out, they're not happy, and so on. Now, whether he was told a lot more about the investigation, that I don't know. I didn't personally brief him.

Public Accounts committee  I will check and let you know. The PCO was briefed as early as April 13, 2005.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I know that the Office of the Comptroller General, which is in the Treasury Board Secretariat and deals with audit matters, and so on, would have been briefed—verbally certainly—before that. I have a note that certainly by June 2005, the Treasury Board Secretariat was briefe

Public Accounts committee  No, I didn't meet with him personally.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. The President of the Treasury Board would have been involved in discussions sometime before October 2005, because when he announced the new policy on internal audit, there was a reference to separating out auditing from consulting at CAC. So in order to make such an announc

Public Accounts committee  I'll check. I believe we discussed the restructuring of CAC, to separate out consulting and auditing. But no, we didn't describe the whole problem with contracting, what we did about it, and so on, to that degree.

Public Accounts committee  No, Mr. Chairman. You see, in the business that we go through, there are occasions when there may be potential fraud or serious misconduct, and they take quite a bit of work to investigate. We hired KPMG to come in, and so on. It's not normal to sort of list all these and talk a

Public Accounts committee  Yes, I did. He did get it, yes.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, PCO was briefed. The Prime Minister would have many issues, so I don't know whether the PCO raised it to his level.

Public Accounts committee  No.

Public Accounts committee  No, Mr. Chairman. This was an investigation into potential wrongdoing and problems, so it's not an internal audit in that regard. It has a lot of names of persons involved, and so on, so we would be responsible for taking action to inform central agencies but not for posting it o

Public Accounts committee  Under the current structure of rules, there is not, but we weren't trying to circumvent them. There were questions in the House on this subject, and there were newspaper articles. We were operating within the bounds of finding out what the problem was and taking action, and....

Public Accounts committee  Well, Mr. Chairman, we did inform the Auditor General so that she would be able to judge the extent to which she wanted to report this or dig into it at her discretion. She was informed, and she's an officer of Parliament. We did what we thought we could.

Public Accounts committee  That's a big question.