Public Accounts committee  I'll ask Ms. Talbot to respond to that.

Public Accounts committee  Certainly it's important for the department to act quickly on these types of issues, Mr. Chair, to maintain public confidence in the whole aviation system. That is fundamentally the reason that it's important to act quickly.

Public Accounts committee  I will ask Ms. Talbot to deal with the similarities between the two reports.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, at this point we've received the action plan and, as I said, it appears to be sufficient, but we haven't done an audit on the action plan. We haven't done an audit on the work that was done, so I can't say for myself whether the action plan has solved all of the issues

Public Accounts committee  Really, what we were suggesting is that today you have the opportunity to hear from the department to get the details of their action plan and to hear from them about their timeframes and how they are going to go about implementing the plan. What we were suggesting in the opening

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, we presented the audit in the spring; since then, we have received the plan that the department has put together, which, as I said in my opening remarks, seems sufficient if it is put in place. However, we haven't done any audit work in terms of that plan, so I ca

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss chapter 5 of our spring 2012 report, “Oversight of Civil Aviation-Transport Canada”. Joining me at the table are Maurice Laplante, Assistant Auditor General, and Lucie Talbot, Director, who were responsible for the audit. Th

Public Accounts committee  Certainly we work closely with internal audit shops in government departments and agencies. We will often share plans with them to try to make sure we aren't both auditing the same thing at the same time. So we do work closely with them. We also appear before departmental audit c

Public Accounts committee  To the best of my knowledge—and I think I can speak personally and for the folks here with me—we have not had any discussions with any department about potential reductions to internal audit they might be proposing.

Public Accounts committee  When we look at a department and at what we're going to audit in a department, one of the things we assess when we're looking at risks is the strength of their internal audit shop. So if we found that a department was going to reduce internal audit—and again it's not something I

Public Accounts committee  Again, we haven't been consulted on any reductions in individual departments or agencies or what the impacts might be for us. If an organization were significantly reducing its internal audit shop, that would increase the risk factors in that organization. We would want to make

Public Accounts committee  At this point, we've looked out over the next three years. The budget reduction proposal we brought forward deals with the three years. Actually, as I understand it, the reduction is all really in that third year, so we have some time to deal with the impact of it. We haven't go

Public Accounts committee  We have identified that the reduction could affect up to 60 positions. Our plan is to deal with as many of those as possible through attrition. I believe probably about half of those are administrative positions and half of them are audit positions. The audit positions would be a

Public Accounts committee  What we do when we are budgeting for an audit is we essentially budget for the audit to unroll without there being any issues. For example, we say this is the number of hours we expect we should be able to complete this audit in if we don't identify there being any issues within

Public Accounts committee  The service level reductions we are referring to in the budget proposal are internal service levels. In fact our renewal of audit methodology project has been geared to making sure we continue to produce quality audits—audits this committee can depend on. Our intention is to cont