The Agency's Annual Information Return provides most of the data for the reports we share with co-ops, so data quality is of the greatest importance.

In the first year, auditors had to file a partial return for the previous year, as well as a full AIR. We had underestimated the staff resources needed to review the first AIR filings, so we brought in extra help and improved our processes. By autumn 2007 the double-cohort problem was easing and auditors were filing more accurate returns with less support from our AIR Help Desk. By the end of the year, the backlog was all but gone.

Notifying co-ops of health and safety concerns within three business days of a property inspection was a challenge. Our breakthrough early in 2007 was to instruct our inspectors to give the co-op a form describing any health and safety problems, before leaving. This change gave us a success rate of 100 per cent in meeting this standard by the third quarter.

In 2007 we moved to a schedule that spaces inspections out over the spring, summer and fall, relieving the bottlenecks experienced the year before and allowing us, before the final quarter, to meet the standard.

In early 2007, a number of risk assessment reports required corrections and were re-issued to co-ops. In tracking our performance against the standard, we used the date the revised report was sent, which resulted in a missed deadline. Co-ops in a very small specialized program required a unique risk assessment report developed especially for their use; they had to wait for their report until this work had been completed. By the second quarter, we were consistently meeting the standard.

Throughout the year, we consistently reached our standard for sending the compliance report on a timely basis.

We began issuing comparative data reports in October 2007. Agency staff did not have access to monitoring systems tracking their performance until early 2008. Nevertheless, over the year we met the standard 86 per cent of the time.