Moved the adoption of the report.

He said: Honourable senators, the Standing Senate Committee on Audit and Oversight, or AOVS, is focused on ensuring that it is well positioned to provide independent and transparent oversight to support the Senate in its accountability. The committee unanimously agreed that establishing strong oversight processes is the next big step in fulfilling our mandate. In order to do so, the committee finds that it is essential to meet with its counterpart in the United Kingdom.

The U.K. House of Lords Audit and Risk Committee, the U.K. House of Commons audit committees and the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, or IPSA, have a similar mandate and structures as AOVS and have been in operation for over a decade now.

AOVS is at an important and high-profile stage in its work as a new committee: hiring a chief audit executive, establishing a new internal audit function, providing direction on improving and approving a risk-based internal audit plan, approving internal audit resource needs and setting other new practices, for example, an internal audit charter establishing how to liaise with Internal Economy on internal audit matters and so on. The committee is looking to the practices in some comparable models that would help to inform this next phase.

The committee is particularly interested in the lessons learned and best practices from IPSA and the Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, or SCIPSA; the House of Commons audit committees, which are the Administration Estimate Audit and Risk Assurance Committee and the Members Estimate Audit Committee; and the House of Lords Audit and Risk Committee — each of which have external members. The purpose of these meetings would be to have candid, in-person discussions on various audit and oversight matters, many of which would be sensitive or confidential in nature. The audit committees and IPSA do not hold public meetings.

All members of the committee would participate in a full week of meetings. From a business continuity perspective, the members feel it is important for the full committee — especially the external members and chief audit executive, who are not impacted by the election cycle — to participate in this important knowledge transfer from the committee’s counterparts in the U.K.

Colleagues, for this purpose and for these reasons, I hope you will consider this budget. The knowledge that would be gained on this trip is integral to the committee’s mandate, and it would help guide the committee’s future work and ensure it is well positioned to fulfill its essential and independent oversight responsibilities.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Thank you for the question. It is a good and valid question and one that we asked ourselves. The primary reason for the in-person format is that with these committees, it is very sensitive material they are dealing with in terms of internal audits and so on and so forth. They don’t keep public records on these things. Therefore, we can’t review or watch what they are doing. We will probably have some very confidential discussions with them face to face, during which they will share some information with us in that regard. So it is important to do that face to face.

They have a lot of lessons learned. They’ve been operating for 10 years now, and they will fully admit that the first few years were very difficult years. We would like to garner those lessons learned and bring them back, and make sure that we don’t make the same mistakes.

The budget? No, unfortunately, I don’t have that number with me. It was in the report, and I gave the report away — $167,000. Thank you.