Thank you, Madam Chair. Committee conducted a review of best practices of public accounts across the jurisdiction and pulled these ones out. I would like to speak to a couple of them.
One, I really believe having ten years worth of data available from the public accounts would allow us to see these larger trends. It's just simply not really there.
Secondly, we make a number of recommendations of lining up the public accounts to the budget and the variances. There was some very odd disconnect that the public accounts are an accounting exercise done by the accountants. They don't even look at the budgets. If there's a difference in the budget, it doesn't matter to them and it doesn't inform the subsequent budget. They're done by different people, and there's just consistent areas where the budget and the public accounts don't line up. Revenue projections being one of them.
We have never predicted our revenue accurately within tens of millions of dollars. And the comptroller general will point this out, and for some reason it doesn't then make a change in the budget. We are one of the worst jurisdictions for this. We get an "F" when people review our financial transparency because our budget and our public accounting are just not aligned. Many other jurisdictions have made it work so that when the public accounts and the accountants point something up, it automatically makes a change in the corresponding main estimates. That's not occurring here. I really would like the comptroller general and the Department of Finance to get together to make that happen. Thank you, Madam Chair.