Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much. I'm going to assure you that we—the department, my predecessor, and I—certainly took this situation very seriously and implemented immediate actions. As I mentioned earlier, we did take disciplinary action. The employee who was responsible for this program, whose name I will not release because of the Privacy Act, the director responsible, was relieved of his duties and he is no longer under the employment of the department or the public service.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, he was relieved of his duties. He was dismissed—

Public Accounts committee  No. I think the primary mismanagement was the responsibility of the program director, and the program director was relieved of his responsibilities as a result of both the recipient audit undertaken by Consulting and Audit Canada and our own internal audit.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, there was no way to establish whether there was any collusion. We certainly had that reviewed and ensured that there was the opportunity to provide the RCMP with the question of whether or not there was any criminal activity involved. The RCMP declined to investigate, after its review.

Public Accounts committee  As a consequence of the events that happened between 2003 and 2005, there was a much elevated level of focus on contribution agreements. As I mentioned, we not only have put in place the oversight mechanisms and specific tools, such as checklists; we have also strengthened the language in the agreements themselves, and we ensure that we have engagement of our legal services in the review of all contribution agreements.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. That, as well as our management accountability framework that is administered through the Treasury Board, has a number of management indicators that we report on, on an annual basis. I think it's clear that there has been a very strong improvement in the overall financial management across government.

Public Accounts committee  It has been developed, actually, through our centre of excellence in the transfer review. I wonder if I could ask my ADM to comment on the training that has been developed.

Public Accounts committee  I was trying to provide the committee with a fairly comprehensive overview of the measures we've put in place to improve the overall management of our grants and contributions. It certainly wasn't my intent to be overstating those, but I want to say that at the time we initiated the internal audit, the focus was very much on our management control framework and ensuring that we had adequate controls in place to govern adherence to terms and conditions and to ensure value for money.

Public Accounts committee  As I mentioned in my opening statement, we did put in place a much higher level of oversight, both through our financial management branch and, independently from the program area, through the establishment of a transfer review committee. Through that, I believe we've had a much higher level of external review and scrutiny and have improved the overall management of our contribution agreements.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, what this chapter that the Auditor General brought forward focuses on is one isolated case within a department that develops and administers thousands of contracts. The person who is responsible for this no longer works for our department. We have addressed this from a labour relations perspective and we have put in place two very strong oversight mechanisms as well as developing very detailed checklists.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. All payments under these contribution agreements have now been concluded; all payments have been made. Under the Canadian Energy Efficiency Association Transport, there were payments withheld and not paid after the review of the specific deliverables against actual work performed.

Public Accounts committee  The concerns at that time were due to the information that was discovered by the department: that the subcontractors were not being paid.

Public Accounts committee  I wish I had more detail to provide to you on this. I think there was some communication back to the department, perhaps through phone calls, from subcontractors saying they had not been paid by the contractor with whom we had the contribution agreement.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. The first action taken by the department was to ask Consulting and Audit Canada to undertake a recipient audit, which was initiated in 2005. From the findings of that recipient audit, there appeared to be enough risks that an internal audit was undertaken by the department.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that's correct.