Thank you, Chair.
To the first question on DPRs, it was a question simply of resources and being able to do it right now. I would like our team that deals with this to take a look at the kind of work we could do in this area. They're doing some initial thinking about it.
For example, I wonder if we shouldn't look at this whole reporting to Parliament initiative, which has seemingly been going on for a quite a while--that is, trying to get better information to parliamentarians. It would be interesting for us to find out where that's at. Have they thought about how they could make DPRs and RPPs more relevant and easier to understand for people? I think we need to take a broader look rather than simply assessing individual DPRs. If the committee wants, we'd certainly be glad to share with you the methodology we've used to rate them. It may even be on our website, but we can certainly discuss with the researchers and the clerk how to go about that.
I think audit committees will be very useful. I would perhaps urge some caution about how the audit committees would appear before committee because they are advisory to the deputy minister. I think some thought has to be given to that. I know regular meetings are held by the Comptroller General with the various departmental audit committee members. It might be useful at some point for this committee, or certain members of this committee, to meet with this group and have a discussion on how you could work together on some of these issues. We can certainly suggest to the Comptroller General that he should start thinking about some of this stuff.
In finding auditors, we have been successful in meeting our recruiting targets. As I mentioned earlier, we can't compete with the private sector on salary, but we certainly try to compete on work-life balance. We are able to attract a number of very competent, very bright young people into the office because of that. We have to be very careful that we maintain that advantage as compared to the private sector.
Finally, to the national professional practices group, we have an association of legislative auditors in Canada, the Canadian Council of Legislative Auditors. It has been in existence for probably 10 years or more, and we meet formally twice a year. We have a number of working groups and we do concurrent or collaborative audit work together. On the list of audits that's coming, electronic health records, we have worked as a group. I believe six provincial auditors general will be auditing electronic health records, and we are going to try to produce a summary report for all of us.
This national professional practices group came out of a recognized need from all of us that with the changing standards and professional requirements we could not do it individually. It was impossible. We have agreed to provide those services for a fee to the provincial auditors.
For example, when exposure drafts come out of new standards, our group does an analysis of it and we will share the position with them. They have expertise in certain areas that we don't have, such as education and health. We hope that over time we will be able to use and tap into those resources. It's really a sharing of resources of all of the legislative audit community across the country. With that, we hope to all be better professionals.