Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the Member has stated, on a number of occasions, concerns around the human resources and our dealing with employees and a lot of those reasons are shared by the government overall in a sense. That's why we've gone through this process of amalgamation. It's just been approximately eight months. The decision was made to proceed in May. In June we started the process in earnest. Doing this work and finding out what was involved and working with departments. You look at us and there are 13 departments, but in actuality we dealt with 11 of the departments that had their own HR systems established, as well as boards and agencies. We worked with them to identify staff within their organizations and then worked on a process of bringing them into the system.

Once we had that happening, what we also found was there was a huge backlog of files that needed attention. Some weeks old, some months old, and, yes, even some years old. That caused a lot of concern. In pulling the organization together and trying to re-establish a common understanding of the policies that we have in place and bring everybody under the same interpretation of those policies. It was realized that there were more things that needed to be done.

The Hackett Group is an organization that deals with a number of large companies, as well as governments, that deal with a lot of the human resource issues that we deal with and systems. We're undergoing a fairly intensive review about the systems we use, how we do things, why we touch this piece of paper, why is it not done with the existing system; for example, our PeopleSoft system. It's going to be through that that we hope to identify further areas that we need to improve on. It's one thing of pulling your people together and come up with a common understanding, in an environment where departments and boards have gotten used to having independence, as I guess we can say, where they got used to doing things on their own now being told, no, these are the processes that need to be followed. So the environment we work in, too, can affect the timing of how we get things done.

For some of the actual work that's being done, the Hackett Group itself, I did meet with one of the representatives a few days ago on the work that's being undertaken, but I'll have Ms. Elkin provide some detail of some of the work that's going on within the organization and some of the things we're starting to find. Thank you.