Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The second question is easy to answer. That essentially relates to penalties. The technical term for them is disallowances. Every country must spend something on disallowances each year following an audit from the Commission. It looks at all the schemes and the systems in place to control those schemes and then makes an estimate of the money it should not have given or should not give on the basis of a lack of enforcement, mapping problems or farmers over-claiming. The fact that our disallowance figure will probably be less than €10 million this year out of €1.6 billion is pretty good. Denmark recently had a disallowance figure of €110 million and the UK recently had a disallowance figure of over €200 million. When Deputies and farmers ask me whether we can back off on inspections or being so obsessed with getting digitised maps correct with the delays that come from that, the reason I say "no" is because we will get audited for everything we do. All the mistakes we make will cost us money and it will be in the disallowance figure. At the moment, it is very low but it was much higher than €10 million. We have a constant, fractious ongoing negotiation with the Commission to keep that figure as low as possible. People like Mr. Mc Mahon and others are regularly battling to keep that figure as low as possible.