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1986 Report of the Auditor General of Canada

The Office's Responsibilities and Organization

16.1 In contrast to the two previous years, when the Office of the Auditor General was involved in major reorganization required both by changes in its mandate and by the need to improve efficiency, this year has been one of consolidation in terms of the overall responsibilities of the Office and its organization. Nonetheless, the year has seen significant initiatives in several areas.

16.2 It is therefore appropriate to report on the Office's work by emphasizing the areas that are new, expanded or are receiving special attention. After providing a brief review of our mandate, programs and organization, the chapter discusses four important initiatives in which the Office is currently engaged.

Mission, Mandate and Programs

- to make independent examination of the accounts of federal departments and agencies and of other entities for which he is the appointed auditor, and to express his opinion on their integrity;

- to make such independent examinations and enquiries as he considers necessary and, based on them, to report on whether or not there were significant deficiencies in the management control systems and practices in the audited entity during the period under examination, thereby providing reasonable assurance, where possible, that:

- public assets are safeguarded and controlled;

- transactions are lawful and proper;

- financial, human and physical resources are managed with due regard to economy and efficiency, and procedures are in place to measure and report the effectiveness of programs;

- to call attention to anything that he considers to be of significance and of a nature that should be brought to the attention of the House of Commons, to communicate his findings and observations to management of the audited entity and to make any constructive recommendations he may have;

- to maintain the stature of his Office, share its expertise with Canadian and international colleagues, and contribute to the development of comprehensive audit methodology and practices; and

- to manage his Office with due regard for economy, efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring professional and administrative competence and adherence to applicable government policies.

16.5 Auditing. Each year the Office conducts audits in all departments and agencies to enable the Auditor General to express an opinion on the summary financial statements of the Government of Canada. Annual audits also assess departmental and agency compliance with legislative authority.

16.6 The Auditor General also conducts value-for-money audits in departments and agencies to fulfil the reporting requirements of section 7(2) of the Auditor General Act. Cases are reported where departments or agencies have made expenditures without due regard to economy and efficiency, or where satisfactory procedures have not been established to measure and report the effectiveness of programs. The Office carries out these audits in each major government entity at least once every five years. In addition, the Office conducts government-wide audits when it is feasible and appropriate to examine issues common to a number of departments.

16.7 Reporting. Throughout the audit process, findings are discussed with managers in the entities being audited. At the conclusion of an audit, a formal, detailed report is communicated to the management of the audited organization on the Office's findings, conclusions and recommendations. Finally, matters that the Auditor General identifies as being of concern to Members of Parliament are brought together in the annual Report. In addition, an opinion - together with any reservations the Auditor General may have - is given on the Public Accounts of Canada and included in Volume I of the Public Accounts.

Organization

Exhibit not available

16.9 Audit Operations is the largest branch. It consists of six Department and Agency Audit groups, a Crown Corporations group, five Functional and Special Audit groups, a Planning and Co-ordination group, and five Regional Audit groups. The six audit groups for departments and agencies are each headed by an Assistant Auditor General and each is responsible for a mix of entities that have similar requirements in terms of audit skills and special expertise, or have strong program interrelationships. The largest concentration of auditors is in the National Capital Region; in addition, Audit Operations' work is carried out from regional offices in Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton and Vancouver. Personnel also work more or less continuously in Yellowknife and Whitehorse.

16.10 Professional Services provides professional and technical support to Audit Operations. The Branch reviews, edits and publishes the annual Report and other reports. It is also responsible for providing career and professional development and for liaison with Parliament, public relations, communications, and the Office library. The Branch co-ordinates international activities and liaison with the Auditors General of the provinces. It is responsible for professional practices, including the management of auditing methodology development.

16.11 Administrative Services is the Branch that provides central support in the areas of finance, administration, personnel, contracting, official languages and word and information systems.

16.12 While there has been no major reorganization in the Office during the last year, several changes are worth mentioning.

16.13 Following an extensive review, a decision was made to close the Toronto regional office in March 1986. The effect has been to reduce the Office's overall costs and to eliminate duplication of audit activity. In closing the office, great attention was given to the future of the staff members involved. Working closely with other departments, the Office was able to ensure that all personnel satisfactorily pursued their careers or, as in one case, retired.

16.14 The past year also saw the full implementation of the Office's clean air policy. This highly successful program to establish a non-smoking work environment has received high commendation from health authorities and many other groups in the health field. Our policy and program have been widely copied by other organizations.

16.15 The Office remains active on the international scene. The fellowship program, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), continues to bring senior auditors from developing countries to work and study in the Auditor General's Office. Also with CIDA funding, Office personnel are carrying out significant audit and audit training projects in China and the Caribbean. The Auditor General chairs the United Nations Panel of Auditors. Important audit advice is currently being provided by the Office to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Working with the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions, the Office has spearheaded a major new training initiative to assist developing countries to improve their auditing and accounting skills.

16.16 A major initiative involving all branches has been the total revision of the Office's Comprehensive Auditing Manual. Now in a convenient three-volume compact format, the Manual reflects state-of-the-art comprehensive auditing practices.

Financial Resources

Exhibit not available

Specific Initiatives

Auditing the Public Accounts

16.20 For example, the Office has been trying to balance its emphasis on systems and processes with audits oriented more toward programs and operations. At present, a special Professional Practices group project is to review the cost-effectiveness of our comprehensive audits, examining the state of the art in this field in Canada and other countries in both government and the private sector. The project will also build on the knowledge and experience of Office audit teams that have completed or are engaged in these types of audit.

16.21 However, this emphasis on value-for-money auditing tends to obscure the reality that a very large portion of the Office's work is in the more traditional categories of legislative audit. The Auditor General Act, section 6, requires that the Auditor General

shall examine the several financial statements required by section 55 of the Financial Administration Act to be included in the Public Accounts, and any other statement that the President of the Treasury Board or the Minister of Finance may present for audit and shall express his opinion as to whether they present fairly information in accordance with stated accounting policies of the federal government and on a basis consistent with that of the preceding year together with any reservations he may have.

16.23 Part of section 7 of the Auditor General Act requires the Auditor General to bring to the attention of the House of Commons any cases in which he has observed that

- accounts have not been faithfully and properly maintained or public money has not been fully accounted for or paid, where so required by law, into the Consolidated Revenue Fund;

- essential records have not been maintained or the rules and procedures applied have been insufficient to safeguard and control public property, to secure an effective check on the assessment, collection and proper allocation of the revenue and to ensure that expenditures have been made only as authorized; and

- money has been expended other than for purposes for which it was appropriated by Parliament.

16.25 Over the past two years, the Office of the Auditor General has been making a sustained and determined effort to find more cost-effective ways of performing these financial and authorities audits.

16.26 Three factors have contributed to the current intensity of this effort. The first is the growth of computerization; electronic data processing is now widely used in auditing, partly in response to the fact that the "books" to be audited are increasingly being produced using electronic media. The second is that the auditing profession has been examining the question of how much audit work is needed to enable the auditor to provide an opinion. The third is that the Office of the Auditor General, as already noted, has been revising its Comprehensive Auditing Manual, as part of its continual update of its methodology and practices. The revised manual requires the most up-to-date and cost-effective audit techniques.

16.27 In essence, the methodology we have developed involves separating the audit work required by section 6 of the Auditor General Act from that required by section 7. The determination is then made as to how much audit assurance each audit procedure provides, and only what is required to provide sufficient audit assurance to give an opinion on the government's financial statements is selected and performed. This methodology also calls for increased use of statistical sampling, employing the Office's newly developed computerized Central Data Selection procedures and IDEA software, described later in this chapter. As part of the revision process, materiality and the extent of overall audit assurance required were critically evaluated and adjusted where necessary.

16.28 The whole thrust of the new process is to allow the Auditor General to provide his opinion on the financial statements on the basis of the appropriate amount of auditing. Too much would be wasteful; too little would be unacceptable professionally. The benefit is more cost-effective use of the Office's resources.

Program Evaluation and Internal Audit

... the Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts ... provide continuous evidence of the generally high degree of satisfaction on the part of the Committee with the work of the Office of the Auditor General. But laudatory comments on individual audits, or on cross-cutting analyses which form major themes of particular reports by the Auditor General, are not the same thing as an evaluation of the totality of work taken on by his or her Office. Indeed, a judgement that any single area of the Auditor General's work is being well done could be quite consistent with a view that, in the aggregate, too much was being done - or being too well done...

- assessing the effectiveness with which the Office's audit activities support the scrutiny role of the House of Commons;

- assessing whether the quality of the Office's audit work is such that it selects matters of most significance for review, and that it reviews these in a professional and cost-effective manner; and

- assessing whether important management practices and procedures throughout the Office reflect due regard for value for money.

16.32 The following is a summary of the work carried out by the Program Evaluation and Internal Audit group during the past year.

16.33 Evaluation of professional development. In 1985-86, the Auditor General commissioned a private consulting firm to evaluate the Office's professional development training program. The scope of the study was limited to the professional development courses for auditors, excluding the student training program leading to professional certification and training for the International Fellows on short-term appointments to the Office.

16.34 The consultants conducted a written survey and interviews with a sample of one in five professional staff at the OAG to investigate the on-the-job usefulness of skills and knowledge acquired in training. The consultants also observed a number of OAG professional development courses and visited four other auditor training organizations in the United States and Great Britain.

16.35 The main findings of the study were that professional development courses played an important part in developing auditor capabilities; that the OAG had made a sustained and substantial effort to make ongoing training opportunities available to staff; that new audit techniques were disseminated to the staff through training courses; and that most auditors believed the courses provided good value for money in terms of usefulness on the job. The study also found that the OAG's training program compared favourably with that of the other national office of a similar size visited by the consultants. The other three audit offices reviewed were either too much larger or too much smaller than the OAG to allow direct comparisons. However, the consultant's review of the audit training programs in these three offices identified specific examples of excellent training practices that the OAG might consider adopting.

16.36 As comprehensive auditing continues to evolve it will present an increasing challenge to the "training needs analysis and course design" processes within the OAG. Extensive analysis will have to be made of the specific audit tasks to be carried out by the course target groups of the related skills and knowledge to be taught.

16.37 Other related recommendations included:

- giving highest priority to continually updating training in value-for-money auditing, audit project management and data analysis skills;

- providing longer and more intensive in-house training for high priority subjects; and

- implementing, on an urgent basis, the current plan to develop curricula for group and developmental levels in the OAG.

16.39 Post-audit quality review. A post-audit quality review (PAQR) is carried out annually on a representative portion of Office audit work.

16.40 Departmental comprehensive audits. In the past year, the PAQR work on departmental comprehensive audits pursued two questions, 1) Did the Office audit the right things? and 2) Did the Office audit things right?

16.41 As to the first, deciding what to audit in a departmental program is the most important decision in value-for-money auditing. It reflects not only the Office's interpretation of its mandate under the Auditor General Act but also what it considers important about the program being audited.

16.42 Over the past two or three years, the Office has reoriented its approach to value-for-money audits. Less emphasis is being placed on auditing administrative support systems and more on the management and control activities of program delivery.

16.43 Experimentation in audit approaches has been encouraged, and it has been left to individual audit Principals to interpret exactly what is meant by a program-oriented audit and by program results. This led to something of a dilemma: too diligent a pursuit of program results might risk overstepping the Office mandate, but an overly cautious one would lead to auditing matters of little significance. Some of the audit work examined by PAQR fell into these two categories, with the remainder in the middle - but comfortably, perhaps too comfortably, away from the limits of the Office mandate.

16.44 PAQR has recommended, for field testing, an approach to deciding on audit scope that should lead to greater consistency in selecting matters of significance for audit. Further, it has recommended that the Office's Professional Practices group undertake development of explicit criteria and methodology for this approach.

16.45 The second question addressed by PAQR, whether the Office audited things right, called for an assessment of the appropriateness of the audit objectives, as well as the tasks and procedures followed in achieving them.

16.46 PAQR found that the diversity of government programs required equally diverse audit approaches and techniques. The OAG Comprehensive Auditing Manual can provide only general guidance in the development of audit programs. Audit Principals are expected to, and do, exercise considerable flexibility in their approach to the audit of particular programs. While innovation is expected and encouraged, it must fall within the boundaries of generally accepted auditing standards.

16.47 Once audit Principals have selected matters of significance for audit in any particular departmental program, they must carry out the audit in a professional and cost-effective manner. A well designed and executed audit program will accomplish this.

16.48 PAQR examined a cross-section of departmental audit work reported on in the 1985 annual Report. Particular attention was paid to assessing the design and use of audit programs.

16.49 Here again, the transition to program auditing has had its effect. Audit programs tended to be more exploratory and less crisp than was the case in auditing administrative support systems.

16.50 PAQR concluded that the audit work met generally accepted standards but that there were some opportunities for increasing productivity. A number of recommendations were prepared for the consideration of the Executive Committee.

16.51 Crown corporations and other entities . The review of audit reports on these organizations was preceded by development, for field testing, of a standardized PAQR assessment method which would permit comparisons of quality across audits and over time. The merits and practicability of this approach will be determined over the next several months. Meanwhile, the PAQR reviews conducted so far reveal continued compliance with generally accepted auditing standards. As well, the audit aids introduced in the preceding year were satisfactorily implemented.

16.52 Follow-up on the previous year's PAQR work showed that subsequent audits satisfactorily implemented the PAQR recommendations.

16.53 Accounts of Canada . The PAQR examination of the Office's work in this area has so far disclosed satisfactory compliance with generally accepted auditing standards.

16.54 Internal Audit of Administrative Services Branch. The objective of this audit was to assess the reasonableness of the nature, level and costs of services provided by the Administrative Services Branch.

16.55 The Branch's services include personnel, corporate EDP systems, finance, contracting, official languages, materiel, accommodation, records and mail, word processing and audio-visual services - much like the administrative functions of most government departments. The cost of these services for 1986-87 is budgeted at 122 person-years (18.5 per cent of the total person-years for the Office) and $7 million (16 per cent of the Office's budget).

16.56 The audit examined how the need for the various administrative services is established, delivered and controlled. Comparisons were made with other legislative auditing bodies and public accounting firms with allowances for differences in size and environment. Users were interviewed and surveyed to determine their satisfaction with the services and to elicit any suggestions or comments about how they could or should be improved.

16.57 The internal audit is not finished, and the observations are not complete. It appears, however, that the services provided by the Branch are generally consistent with administrative services provided by the other organizations contacted, and staff are generally satisfied with the types and levels of service provided. It also appears that the costs of providing administrative services to the Office are roughly comparable to costs in other legislative audit organizations.

16.58 The Branch has made progress in developing and documenting administrative policies and procedures for the Office and in formalizing its own management planning and control systems.

16.59 For Personnel and Corporate EDP Services within the Branch, the audit has been completed, and some important opportunities for improvement have been identified.

16.60 The Personnel group and the Office as a whole would benefit from more comprehensive development and dissemination of personnel policies. The Personnel group also needs to become more formally involved in the Office's overall planning for human resources through participation in both strategic and operational planning activities. This would facilitate the shift from a reactive to a more active approach by the group on a short-and long-term basis. Also, the Personnel group should tighten its controls over classification actions, particularly monitoring of non-audit positions to ensure that position descriptions properly reflect the duties performed.

16.61 While positions occupied by non-audit staff are classified according to classification standards, for its audit professionals the Office has adopted a practice of appointment to level of competence. In both cases, appropriate monitoring of promotions and classification actions is critical to provide adequate control over the inevitable pressure for higher classifications and pay and to ensure that classification levels of staff match actual work requirements.

16.62 Generally, the EDP Services unit provides efficient and effective services. The audit did, however, reveal that some Office staff were not aware of the range of services provided by the unit and consequently less than full use is made of its outputs.

16.63 The overall management of EDP in the Office is also of some concern. EDP development activity under the direction of the Audit Operations Branch's Computer Audit group is now focused on facilities and applications to increase the efficiency of audit teams. The increased activity of the Computer Audit group, particularly in identifying needs for administrative and managerial systems, has led to some confusion concerning responsibility for the Office's overall long-term EDP strategy.

16.64 The internal audit is continuing, and the remaining areas will be reported on in our next annual Report.

Work of the Crown Corporations Group

- to report, when required to do so in those corporations where he is the auditor, on the accuracy and consistency of quantitative performance information contained in Crown corporations' annual reports;

- at least once every five years, to conduct a special examination (a review of financial and management control and information systems and management practices) in some 30 Crown corporations;

- to be consulted by other auditors carrying out audits and special examinations of Crown corporations with respect to any matter that, in the opinion of those auditors, should be brought to the attention of Parliament; and

- to attest to the accuracy of quarterly reports, submitted by Treasury Board to Parliament, concerning the timely tabling of annual reports and summaries of corporate plans and budgets.

16.67 To provide a focal point for fulfilling its responsibilities with respect to Crown corporation audits, the Office has formed a Crown Corporations group within the Audit Operations Branch. This group has both functional and operational responsibilities.

16.68 The Accountability Issues unit assists in developing Office policy concerning the accountability of Crown corporations and other non-departmental entities in which the government has an interest. With respect to the amended Financial Administration Act, the unit provides advice and assistance to audit teams conducting special examinations and, when required, audits of quantitative information. The unit also provides advice to private sector auditing firms involved in Crown Corporation audits and special examinations.

16.69 The Technical Resources unit is responsible for ensuring the quality of audit opinions and financial reports issued by the Office. Its activities cover mainly Crown corporations but extend to all other entities for which the Auditor General issues a separate audit opinion, except for the Accounts of Canada.

16.70 The unit's main objective is to develop and ensure the implementation of Office policy, standards and methodology in presenting opinions, financial reports and statements. It offers a consultation service to audit teams to help them resolve technical accounting, financial statement presentation and audit reporting problems and to keep up with current professional developments. It must review all draft financial statements and audit opinions before the Auditor General or the designated Deputy Auditor General signs the auditor's report. This activity involves reviewing approximately 100 separate audit opinions each year.

16.71 Current operational activities of the Crown Corporations group arise from its responsibility for the annual financial (attest) audit work in three major Crown corporations: Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL); the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC); and Canada Post Corporation (CPC). In addition, the group is responsible for special examinations of CPC and AECL.

16.72 These audit activities are the specific responsibility of the Crown Corporations group; but this by no means describes the total work of the Office in auditing Crown corporations. A far larger number of audits (see paragraphs 16.89 to 16.96) is carried out by Departments and Agencies Audit groups whose areas of concern encompass related Crown corporations and other entities.

Work of the Computer Audit Group

16.74 The audit applications of this technology have been even more significant for the Office. Audit applications of electronic data processing are the overall responsibility of the Office's Computer Audit group. The group provides expertise and methodology to audit teams evaluating financial controls in computerized systems in departments and agencies and for assessing whether value for money has been achieved in expenditures on electronic data processing. The group has five main activities:

- providing EDP audit expertise to support the Office's financial audit work; for example, the attest opinion given by the Office on the government's financial statements and those of some Crown corporations, and the assessment of the adequacy of financial controls in EDP-based systems in the government;

- providing facilities and expertise to the Office in the areas of sampling methodology and computer audit software;

- providing staff to audit the value-for-money component of EDP management and control in comprehensive audits and government-wide studies;

- identifying and carrying out investigations of EDP issues across government; and

- providing overall support to microcomputer users in the Office.

16.76 As reported last year, the IDEA concept was one important product of the group's analysis of computer needs - Interactive Data Extraction and Analysis. This software was developed in the Office of the Auditor General. It provides a method for allowing an auditor to bring an audit client's data onto a microcomputer. It is interactive, flexible and very easy to use. The auditor can run any number of enquiries without incurring additional computer processing cost. Because the system responds within seconds to each enquiry, the auditor can explore financial records at great speed and in greater depth than was previously possible.

16.77 A part of the activity of the Computer Audit group during the past 12 months has been in implementing applications of IDEA for specific audit situations. At the same time, paralleling IDEA, has been the development within the Office of the Central Data Selection (CDS) system. The entire data bank of the Consolidated Revenue Fund is analysed and balanced on large mainframe computers and can then be made available by entity for the Office's departmental auditors to use with IDEA.

16.78 CDS is a set of data extraction mainframe programs designed to access in detail the general ledger of the Government of Canada's Central Accounting System. The general ledger files contain the detailed records used in preparing the monthly departmental statements and the government's financial statements. The CDS system can produce reports on departments, accounts, standard objects or cost centres, based on techniques such as statistical sampling, selection of high value items, variance analysis and journal voucher analysis.

16.79 The use of microcomputer technology has resulted in many significant productivity improvements and greater efficiency in our audit work.

16.80 IDEA was introduced to audit teams in November 1985, five months before the close of 1985-86 fiscal year. In those five months, IDEA was used on some 55 audit engagements by Office staff. At the time of this Report going to press, 22 audit teams were using the system. The increase in audit productivity and effectiveness has been marked. For example:

- IDEA was used in the audit of the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation. Within two days of receiving the relevant computer tapes from the Corporation, our auditors had loaded the data onto IDEA and were taking samples and looking into the payouts. This work would in the past have taken a computer specialist some three weeks to perform.

- The system was employed in the audit of a federal Crown corporation. Here the Office recreated the revenue side of the Corporation's financial statements using IDEA. We found some significant differences. These were eventually traced to an error during a conversion to a new computerized accounting system by the Corporation. The financial statements were duly adjusted, revenue and accounts receivable being reduced by $300,000.

- In the audit of Energy, Mines and Resources, by using IDEA instead of our normal mainframe data extraction, we saved some $10,000 in direct computer processing time, compared to the previous year.

16.82 An auditor on the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources team used a spreadsheet to develop a salary model for EMR, estimating salary costs for the fiscal year as part of the annual Public Accounts audit. Using the spreadsheet model, the audit team can detect material errors in EMR's pay costs within two days, in place of the two weeks it used to take using traditional pencil and calculator procedures.

16.83 For the Canadian Dairy Commission audit, the auditors used a spreadsheet application to program subsidy payment calculations. Using their spreadsheet to reprocess the Commission's subsidy payments, the auditors reported a time saving of 100 hours from the 150 it used to take to do this audit step alone. The audit director reported that the microcomputer not only improved the accuracy of calculations but also relieved the auditor of the tedious task of performing some 3,000 individual calculations by hand.

16.84 The combination of IDEA, Central Data Selection and other microcomputer technology is enabling the Office to become much more efficient and effective in its audit work. Overall, during the last five months of 1985-86, IDEA and other microcomputer applications reduced our direct service costs by at least $40,000. In addition, IDEA has received considerable attention from other government departments, audit firms, and audit offices around the world.

16.85 The Office of the Comptroller General is already using IDEA and has come to an agreement with the Department of Supply and Services to support other government departments and agencies that wish to use the system. The Department of Energy, Mines and Resources is currently using the system as a very effective financial analysis tool. It has found that IDEA saves both time and money. National Revenue-Taxation is testing it for use on taxpayer audits, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has installed it for use by its internal audit group.

16.86 The Office has received enquiries from many other departments, agencies and Crown corporations and has made IDEA available to departments and other government entities at no cost.

16.87 The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) has entered into an agreement with the Government of Canada to market the IDEA system worldwide to auditors and financial managers. The results of these negotiations are that, based on the CICA's marketing plan, the Government of Canada stands to recover almost all the initial development costs of IDEA over the next five years. Furthermore, the Office will receive, free of charge, significant continuing enhancements to the software that are to be paid for by the CICA. These enhancements will also be available to other government departments at nominal cost.

16.88 Last year our annual Report said that "the development of IDEA is a major achievement by the Office and a significant breakthrough in computer auditing. It is expected to have an enormous impact on audits throughout the Office and, indeed, throughout the auditing community." In light of the widespread acceptance of IDEA and of the development of further techniques by the Computer Audit group, that "enormous impact" can be seen already to be taking place.

Costs Incurred in Preparing Reports of Audits and Special Examinations in Crown Corporations

16.90 The costs reported here pursuant to section 149(2) represent the full costs incurred by the Office in carrying out the audit and special examination work and preparing particular reports under section 139 or 143 of the FAA. These costs are reported here only when the work has been completed.

16.91 The total costs of Crown corporations work include costs incurred on work not specifically required under section 139 or 143. This includes, for example, work in relation to issuing prospectuses, advising on information and internal control systems, and helping to resolve accounting issues and to prepare financial statements. The costs incurred for this work are not reported in this chapter.

Annual Audit Reports

16.93 Exhibit 16.3 shows the costs incurred in performing the completed audits and preparing the annual auditor's reports required by section 139 for those corporations and subsidiaries audited solely or jointly by the Auditor General of Canada. The costs refer to the completed annual audits for fiscal years ending on or before 31 March 1986.

Exhibit not available

16.94 The costs reported do not include any costs for the audit of quantitative performance information, because no such audits have been requested by the Treasury Board for any of the corporations the Office audited. Similarly, there were no other reports required by the Governor in Council under section 139.

Special Examination Reports

16.96 Although work on special examinations has started in some corporations, the Office's costs will not be reported until reports have been issued to the boards of directors.

Advisers to the Auditor General

Membership of the Panel of Senior Advisers

H. Marcel Caron, F.C.A., Clarkson Gordon

Gordon H. Cowperthwaite, F.C.A., Canadian Comprehensive Auditing Foundation

Frank A. Hughes, C.A., Pannell Kerr Forster

Giles R. Meikle, F.C.A., Deloitte Haskins & Sells

Edward W. Netten, F.C.A., Price Waterhouse Associates

Donald H. Page, F.C.G.A., Midland Doherty Ltd.

Robert M. Rennie, F.C.A., Touche Ross & Co.

Donald C. Scott, F.C.A., Clarkson Gordon

Kenneth R. Stevenson, C.A., Coopers & Lybrand

T. Robert Turnbull, F.C.A., Thorne, Ernst & Whinney

W. Ross Walker, F.C.A., Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co.

Membership of the Independent Advisory Committee to the Auditor General on Government Accounting and Auditing Standards

James L. Goodfellow, F.C.A., Touche Ross & Co.

John J. Kelly, C.A., Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants

Patrick D. Lafferty, C.A., Coopers & Lybrand

Gérald Langlois, C.A., Raymond, Chabot, Martin, Paré & Associé

Claude LeBon, Ph.D., Simon Fraser University

P. Howard Lyons, F.C.A., Deloitte Haskins & Sells

Don MacLean, F.C.A., Thorne, Ernst & Whinney

Henry E. McCandless, C.A. (Secretary), Office of the Auditor General of Canada

R.B. Robinson, F.M.C., Thorne Stevenson & Kellogg

L.S. Rosen, F.C.A., York University

Edward R. Rowe, C.A. (Vice-Chairman), Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Leonard Rutman, Ph.D., Price Waterhouse

W.R. Sloan, F.C.A., Arthur Andersen & Co.