The Scott Report represents possibly the most exhaustive study produced to that date of the individual responsibility of ministers to Parliament. Scott comments on the difficulty of extracting from departments the required documents (some 130,000 of them in all) and notes that Customs and Excise could not find out what Ministry of Defence export policy was, and that intelligence reports were not passed on to those who needed to know. The Economist commented that "Sir Richard exposed an excessively secretive government machine, riddled with incompetence, slippery with the truth and willing to mislead Parliament".[citation needed]