Public Accounts committee  I believe that two of three of these executives reported directly to the deputy minister.

Public Accounts committee  They reported to the deputy minister. All three of them were department employees. I thought your question was aimed at finding out whether these executives reported directly to the deputy minister.

Public Accounts committee  All three of them were department employees.

Public Accounts committee  As I explained earlier, you can go through all the different decision points in the steps, and it is comprehensible to understand those decision points and when different decisions should have been made to correct the problem. What's incomprehensible, as you said, is how nobody

Public Accounts committee  Once again, it's hard for me to answer that, because we haven't done any audit work on those figures, or on the work accomplished since our audit. Clearly, there seems to be progress, but it is very important for the department to clearly describe it, and provide all the approp

Public Accounts committee  Certainly, we said that the people responsible put the emphasis on delivering the project within time and on budget.

Public Accounts committee  They made those decisions. As we explained in the report, they had an original IT budget of $155 million. When they went to IBM to say what they wanted the system to do, IBM said it would cost $274 million. That was when the project executives decided to reduce the functionality

Public Accounts committee  Again, the budget would have been approved by Treasury Board when the project was approved. To me, though, the fundamental issue here was that the department, in my estimation, had a responsibility to go back to Treasury Board either to ask for more money or to tell Treasury Boa

Public Accounts committee  Again, yes, they decided to cut back on the functionality, and as the product progressed, the importance of those functions that they had decided to cut back on became more and more evident. They should have been able to realize that cutting out things like being able to pay peop

Public Accounts committee  Of course, we talked to these three people. We asked them questions about each of their decisions. We also reviewed the background documents that were discussed with the deputy minister. I'll ask Mr. Goulet if he has any details on each of these conversations.

Public Accounts committee  Again, I think there are two aspects to it. As you mention in your question, there's the cultural aspect, but then there's also the procedural aspect. I think the underappreciation of the problems got through too many people, partly because there was not oversight built into the

Public Accounts committee  The message that I delivered was about the necessity to look to the culture and what needs to be changed and effected in the culture. I think we heard from the deputy minister today that they are doing some things within that department to try to identify where there could have b

Public Accounts committee  I think that statement is pretty clear. Again, it comes back to the fact that we couldn't find things like documentation for who actually said, “Yes, the system is ready to go. Let's go live with it.” There was also the number of deputy minister changes that happened. The deputy

Public Accounts committee  Again, that's one of the cultural issues that I identified in the message, the fact of the tenure of deputy ministers in these positions. I believe there were four different deputy ministers, including Ms. Lemay coming in right at the very end in PSPC, in that time period.

Public Accounts committee  Again, that type of turnover of deputy ministers, I believe, is something that is problematic. We see it all of the time in our audits, when we do an audit and then come back with a follow-up audit, I think sometimes there is, in fact, a third deputy in the middle there. We do th