Mr. Pat Houlihan:

Again, as I have said, nobody has identified anything that would stand up in a court of law, in terms of the fundamental responsibility of an auditor vis-à-vis the plight of the financial institutions. That link has not been made. However, if we meet the committee again in the future and someone digs something up in the meantime that fingers an auditor or a firm of auditors, we would like to hear about it, discuss it and determine where the flaw or fault lay. As of now, however, nothing like that has been identified.

One thing that I have not mentioned so far, that is currently in train, is quality assurance. I do not know if all members of the committee are familiar with that term, although I know at least one member is. Embedded in the regulation is an obligation to have quality assurance for public interest entities, in particular, which is operated by the oversight authority in each member state, which is the Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority, IAASA, in our case. We are progressing along the route of instituting a quality assurance system which IAASA will operate, having recruited ten or 11 highly-qualified people to do so. Effectively this will be an inspection system whereby the audit of public interest entities will be invigilated and inspected, not by the body to which the auditor or accountant belongs, but by IAASA. In essence, IAASA will call to practitioners, ask for the files on audits, examine them, question the practitioners about them and so forth. That is one of the most important elements of the regulation in terms of improving the whole area of auditing and hopefully we, as a country, will have our quality assurance system in place sooner rather than later.