Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Deputy O'Donnell has mentioned FÁS. One of the things we recognised after the issues were raised with FÁS was that we needed to change what we were doing with regard to propriety matters and in 2009 we developed a programme of work that focuses more on propriety issues, such as expenses, remuneration of chief executives and so on. Another response since then has been the further development and revision of the code of practice for the governance of State bodies to require the disclosure in financial statements of the remuneration of chief executives and of the expenses they incur. Had those things been in place, we might have picked on the issue sooner.

In fairness to Mr. McFeely, I would make the point that we began to apply our new programme with the 2009 audits, which we carried out in 2010. Mr. McFeely and WIT have traditionally been one of the first to produce draft financial statements. We would have been carrying out our audit of the 2008-09 financial statements at the time we were developing the propriety framework. Therefore, we were not focusing on those issues during the audit and would not have found or picked up on them. We would, of course, have drawn the institute's attention to anything we found in our management letter. In our 2010 propriety work, we picked up on some of the issues and these were mentioned in the management letter.