Public Accounts committee  We would have to get back to you. We would have to seek that information with the departments and see exactly what it was due to, and we'll gladly come back on that.

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry; your mike was not coming through clearly. I think your colleague asked a fairly similar question. We did a survey with a whole bunch of different groups, like I said, external and internal stakeholders to see how we could make the public accounts a lot more friendly.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, and there could be—

Public Accounts committee  When you have a lapse, you need to look at the reason for the lapse. Every lapse of every department should be unbundled to look at what the reason is. We had a quite substantive increase in the lapse this year. One reason is the timing of the payment for one of the key indigen

Public Accounts committee  The spend went up, but it's about planning. I don't disagree with you.

Public Accounts committee  You're absolutely right that most of the contingent liabilities are liabilities in relation to indigenous claims. In the last few years, we've seen a lot of these litigations get settled and negotiated. In the world of accounting, when we have one of these litigations where we

Public Accounts committee  There is a governance piece around that, which manages all of these litigations. I am the taker of it, to be fair. The exposure is greater than simply what you see as a contingent liability number because we have many cases on the go. As we refine them, we need to start recogni

Public Accounts committee  I don't have an amount for that. I can tell you that we recognize those particular cases where we feel we're going to be paying an amount and our assessment is that there is more than a 90% chance that we're going to be in that zone. As these cases work through the system, w

Public Accounts committee  Okay. The CEBA loans are a thing of—

Public Accounts committee  Right now, every year, obviously, through EDC, they need to evaluate what they think their provision is for potential losses. Depending on the trend that they see in repayment, it might take.... If there's an extension to the payment authority and that loan.... We can't forget.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. I have been a CFO for many years. When you run a budget in a department, you try to lapse as little as possible, to be fair. With sound financial management, you're trying to—

Public Accounts committee  She has the nice job.

Public Accounts committee  In their report, this committee did ask us to do that, and we did. We launched a consultation exercise. Internal and external stakeholders were surveyed. We looked at how we could streamline things. There are requirements in the public accounts that have been there since 1950, fo

Public Accounts committee  Well, exactly. You get a budget—voted authorities, as we call it—and any amount that's not spent will become a lapsed amount. The amount of the lapse in the last fiscal year was $54.2 billion.

Public Accounts committee  No, it doesn't all automatically get carried forward. What happens is that in the world of unspent funds, there are different things that you may ask for. First of all, every department, under what they call their "operation vote", is allowed to carry forward up to 5%. On what we