Human Resources committee  Not really. I mean—

Human Resources committee  The one example I could give you that probably relates to that is the TTY service that was removed at Veterans Affairs. The deputy minister, at the public accounts hearing, made it clear that this should not have happened and that they're reinstating it.

Human Resources committee  We have made a recommendation with respect to TBS that it clearly specify to call centres and their responsible departments the direction to take to ensure that the standards they have put in place are in accordance with TBS recommendations, which are relevant to Canadians, trans

Human Resources committee  They are accessibility, response accuracy and timeliness.

Human Resources committee  What we're saying is that TBS should ensure that service standards are in place, but that it doesn't have to specify the details.

Human Resources committee  We were looking at whether there were specific standards with regard to the accuracy of the information. We didn't audit accuracy as part of this audit report because of the complexity of the variety of call centres that exist. That would require—

Human Resources committee  Yes, that was the CRA one.

Human Resources committee  Those are the numbers that were reported by the department, so they are their actual numbers. The problem is that we couldn't verify those numbers because the source data was not kept by the department.

Human Resources committee  Absolutely. This example is very relevant to access and response time standards. We didn't look at the issue from a service reduction perspective. We didn't find a similar situation in other departments.

Human Resources committee  As I mentioned earlier, what we were interested in was the three specific standards—whether the callers were getting access to the agent, whether they were getting timely responses, and whether they were getting accurate responses. We didn't look at how long an agent would be tal

Human Resources committee  In this case, these were calls in which the caller wanted to talk to an agent but could not do so for a variety of reasons that we explained earlier on. They were either redirected to the automated service, asked to go to the website or disconnected. These are basically what we c

Human Resources committee  We asked to have access to the data of the call centres in order to do that analysis. We also requested the reports that the department had on that type of information. We could talk about the information that was in the report but the data itself was not available, so we couldn'

Human Resources committee  Yes.

Human Resources committee  For the purposes of this audit we didn't really look at the standards of the private sector. We wanted to use a benchmark that was as close as possible to what happens in general when Canadians want to speak to the government. That's why we went to that survey, which basically sa

Human Resources committee  We didn't look at the amount of time an agent should be spending with a caller. We only looked at whether the callers were getting access and whether the information that was being provided to them was provided in a timely manner, as per the standards. We also didn't look at whet