How SIRC's Annual Audit Report is Organized

The report is organized to reflect the Committee's primary functions: first, to review CSIS intelligence activities, second, to investigate complaints about CSIS and associated matters and third, to act in concert with other parts of the governance system to protect Canadians from threats to their security.

• Section 1 presents the Committee's review and audit of what the Service does and how it does it. The subsections represent the different methods the Committee employs to make these assessments.
• Section 2 deals with the Committee's role as a quasi-judicial tribunal with the power to investigate complaints of various kinds.
• Section 3 brings together under one heading—CSIS Accountability Structure—the Committee's review of the multiple administrative and legal mechanisms that hold the Service accountable to Government, Parliament, and the people of Canada.

As before, the report draws a clear distinction between Committee comments, observations and recommendations bearing directly on our major task—reviewing CSIS and associated activities for a certain period—and the more general background material we are making available with the aim of assisting Canadians and other readers to understand the context in which security and intelligence work is carried on.

Subjects the Committee believes will be of historical, background or technical interest to readers are set apart from the main text in shaded insets. Unlike the main body of the report, they do not reflect Committee opinion or conclusions as such and are intended to be factual in nature.

Each section of the audit report is labelled with the SIRC study from which it is abstracted. The full references are found in Appendix B.