OTTAWA — Former public safety minister Anne McLellan was told about a possible cost overrun in the federal long-gun registry in early 2004, but it's unclear whether she played a role in a subsequent strategy to hide the spending, a parliamentary committee was told Thursday.

"The written record is very scant," said Peter Kasurak, an official in Auditor General Sheila Fraser's office.

He said it's clear McLellan was "alerted" to the fact that the Canada Firearms Centre was facing unforeseen computer costs that might push its budget over the limit provided for in government spending estimates.

The centre initially proposed to seek supplementary spending authority from Parliament to cover the costs.

Instead, senior bureaucrats eventually decided on another solution - moving $21.8 million in computer development costs to the following fiscal year.

That decision was cited by Fraser, in a report released this week, as an example of how the former Liberal government "misinformed" Parliament about the gun registry's true costs.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives immediately seized on the report to announce a series of regulatory changes - to be followed later this year by legislation designed to abolish the registry.

Kasurak told the Commons public accounts committee that auditors found no evidence in the paper trail to show McLellan put pressure on her officials to cook the books.

"The officials determined the course of events - as far as the record goes - on their own."

When pressed by Conservative MP David Sweet, however, Kasurak acknowledged that "quite frankly we can't say what happened because the record is far from complete."

The issue is important because then justice minister Martin Cauchon had promised the contentious registry would spend no more than $100 million in fiscal 2003-04.

The decision to solve the accounting problem by pushing off $21.8 million to the next year came just as then prime minister Paul Martin was about to launch an election campaign.

Tories on the committee were quick to draw their own conclusions.

The sequence of events suggests a "high-level conspiracy by senior government officials to hide critical financial information," said MP Jeff Watson.

Fraser swiftly distanced herself from that charge, saying the conclusion was Watson's and not hers.

Speaking later to reporters, however, Fraser did suggest the public accounts committee might want to investigate the matter further.

She said it appears that Margaret Bloodworth, then deputy minister of public safety, made the formal recommendation to defer the $21.8 million until the following fiscal year.

But it's not clear who the other key players were in the affair, said Fraser. "We can see indications of meetings and discussions through e-mails, but that's hardly sufficient."

Shawn Murphy, the Liberal chairman of the committee, said there's all-party agreement for the panel to pursue the matter when MPs return to Ottawa at the end of the month from a week-long break.

Murphy cautioned, however, that the dispute could be nothing more than an honest difference of opinion between federal bureaucrats and Fraser over the proper accounting methods to follow.

"I don't think we can jump to conclusions," he said. "I would prefer to wait and hear the explanations."

The $21.8 million isn't the only suspect transaction cited by Fraser in her report.

She also noted that the firearms centre failed to book another $39 million in computer costs properly in fiscal 2002-03.

But she said that may simply have been an error rather than a deliberate effort to conceal anything.

Murphy said the committee will likely start its probe with testimony from bureaucrats from the firearms centre, Treasury Board and other agencies.

He doesn't anticipate that McLellan and Cauchon will be called "unless there's some evidence that they were involved."

The committee also plans hearings on a range of other matters raised by Fraser, including the former government's handling of aboriginal programs and its rental practices for government office space.