Throughout the year, we consistently met or surpassed our standard for approving replacement-reserve spending.

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About the value of our client-service standard for approval to spend from the replacement reserve, one of our relationship managers shared this:

"Co-ops are more open to sending us the information and getting approval in advance because they know we're going to try to process them within a day or two. They also know that we are going to be flexible about the expenditures, while still following the rules set out by CMHC. A short story from one of [a colleague's] co-ops: R Co-op never submitted replacement reserve expenditures for approval. This resulted in a compliance variance on their Compliance Report. When [my colleague] spoke with them about the report, she explained that we try to turn these around within one to two days, provided we get all the necessary information. The co-op only had to experience this once and now they willingly and regularly submit them for approval in advance."

From the third quarter, when we started measuring, we consistently met or surpassed our standard for providing interim responses to requests for approval to spend replacement reserve funds that can't be approved without more information.

We started tracking this standard in the third quarter, meeting the standard 100 per cent of the time by the fourth quarter.

Throughout the year, we consistently met or slightly surpassed our standard for answering requests for information.

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In 2007, most information requests from clients concerned subsidy matters (second last year), particularly subsidy administration and the calculation of assisted housing charges, although there were several questions about ITA reconciliations. Questions about the AIR moved from first place in 2006 to second. Third in both years were questions to do with replacement reserves. However, in 2007 these information requests were tied with budget enquiries, while in 2006 enquiries on this subject were infrequent.

Since the approval process is a shared responsibility, we set strict deadlines for both the Agency's and CMHC's part of the process. This change led to improved results later in the year.