Thank you, Madam Chair. In response to the Member’s question, the amounts of money that he sees transferring out of the various departments into financial shared services and the Department of Finance represents the amount of resources and, in some cases, people that are transferring from line departments into finance that will be undertaking the financial transaction processing on behalf of departments. The intent is to relieve program managers in the line departments from the day-to-day routine transactions such as travel claims, paying bills and

stuff like that, and standardizing that process across the GNWT into one processing place, which will be in the Department of Finance.

In terms of getting efficiencies, we hope once the processes are standardized and the routines are down, that we’ll start to see the efficiencies in the amount of time it takes to process claims and the amount of less time it takes to receive money and get bills paid. Right now we have a Financial Shared Service Centre up and running in Inuvik in the Beaufort-Delta. That’s the first centre. We have plans to undertake in Norman Wells in January and February, and then later on in the early part of the next fiscal year in the South Slave and then into headquarters is the plan. We’ll see transactions like this or transfers such as these over the next year, year and a bit. That will allow us to fully utilize the investment we’ve made in our new financial system corporately. Really what it will have us do is we’re finding now that things aren’t necessarily done the same way in every department and we hope to standardize that process, thereby making those transactions more routine, more efficient and relieving departmental managers of that duty, and letting them concentrate on managing their budgets and making use of the financial system to make better decisions in managing their budgets.