Public Accounts committee  I would not be prepared to make that comment in those terms. It was the lack of clarity of roles and responsibilities.

Public Accounts committee  Roles and responsibilities of the deputy head, responsibility of machineries, responsibilities of PCO, the roles and responsibilities of other officials, TBS--like I said, the Office of the Comptroller General was not there at the time.

Public Accounts committee  Maybe I could start with the third question. There have been steps taken to prevent a recurrence of such events. When I took over the position of Comptroller General in June 2004, there were essentially two mandates I received. One was to assess and diagnose the health of financi

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I've got a few opening comments, which I'll shorten to give you more time for questions. I'd like to thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee to discuss the November 2006 report of the Auditor Gener

Government Operations committee  As I mentioned earlier, the annual cost of the financial management of the Canadian government is on the order of some $800 to $900 million a year, or $300 million for systems and $600 million for people. Those are the current costs. What would the marginal costs of this system

Government Operations committee  It would be a reasonable order of magnitude.

Government Operations committee  PricewaterhouseCoopers said it would not be more than $150 million.

Government Operations committee  It could be.

Government Operations committee  An order of magnitude for this.

Government Operations committee  Unfortunately I only have the English version of the PricewaterhouseCoopers report here. On page 7, there is a timetable in the diagram showing the implementation of the approach. A number of elements should be changed, including the reference levels. That would be the first elem

Government Operations committee  We have seven systems. At the beginning, I think we used to have 36 or 40. So we are down to seven. Later we would probably like to bring the number down to two or three. These are all systems that can facilitate the approach.

Government Operations committee  The approach will be facilitated by several systems.

Government Operations committee  As I said, I have been moving from models 3 and 4. I think the Auditor General has also been saying model 3 or 4 would be in the zone. I like model 3 because it gives more visibility to parliamentarians, so you make that conscious decision. I like model 4 in the sense that it wil

Government Operations committee  I agree. As I said before, multi-year appropriation would be helpful. It's also very important for Parliament and the government to control the cash position. When you do the multi-year appropriation you should also be very clear in which years you expect to see the cash disperse

Government Operations committee  We must not have a single, one-size-fits-all system. I am not much in favour of that. Furthermore, having just one system for an organization as large as the Canadian government would make me a bit uncomfortable, since the government could be held hostage by a single provider.