Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The review of the estimates is an important part of parliamentary control over spending of public funds. We are pleased to see the committee's interest in the process surrounding the review of the estimates. With me today are Nancy Cheng, Assistant Auditor

Government Operations committee  Thank you for your question. In response to the honourable member's question, I think the critical thing is that the votes themselves need to be clear about what they are for and what they are intended to be for. I think that's the fundamental starting point in all of this: it's

Government Operations committee  Thank you again for the question. Again, it's difficult for us to answer these types of questions. We haven't done a specific audit on the estimates process, so I don't have a detailed audit report on the process here for me to speak to. Certainly I can agree that it's important

Government Operations committee  Again, I don't have a specific document or audit that we have done. Maybe what I will do in response to your question is turn a little bit to my experience in New Brunswick, where I was the comptroller for five years and the deputy minister of finance for one year. Certainly in

Government Operations committee  I think with a number of the questions that I'm going to get on this subject today, I don't have a specific audit report to talk to, so I'll probably go back to my experiences in New Brunswick and how things were done there. One normal practice that we had in New Brunswick was t

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. Part of what we do is that we audit the federal government's public accounts, but we audit that at the sort of macro level of the public accounts to make sure that the financial statements the government presents are presented fairly. We don't perform

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry, I missed the question.

Government Operations committee  I don't.... We haven't abandoned any audit.

Government Operations committee  Certainly, yes, when it comes to financial statements, it needs to be accrual accounting, and we are definitely on record as having recommended that the government also follow an accrual approach in preparing the estimates.

Government Operations committee  Again, it's not something we have done an audit of. As I responded to the earlier questioner, it was a normal practice in New Brunswick on the capital budget side, and we did it once on the operating budget side. On the operating budget side, the advantage, of course, was to ce

Government Operations committee  My recollection in terms of the budget information that was made public was that for the most part it was simply documents available on the Internet and that sort of thing.

Government Operations committee  Again, it's not something we have done significant work on—or done any work on—as to what the right timing is. Anything I would say in response to that would be purely personal. Again, I think the only thing I can really say is that I have seen a budget prepared well in advance o

Government Operations committee  Again, because we just haven't done the work on that, it's not something I can comment on.

Government Operations committee  Well, I can describe to you how it worked in New Brunswick. For the most part, there would have been a vote for a department on ordinary account; there would have been a number of programs within that ordinary account. Each one would have been described in the main estimates. B

Government Operations committee  The work we do in the Office of the Auditor General is that we conduct audits. We set an objective and a set of criteria, and then we audit to those. We haven't done an audit of the estimates process and we don't have an audit of the estimates process under way right now. It's no