Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I was going to come in on this point at the end in any event. In the context of the element of procurement that is reported and in respect of which I identified a difficulty, it is not correct to say that the other 99.9% is clear. What I pointed out in my report and again in my opening statement is that there is actually under-reporting by Departments. That is the first problem. There is a particular difficulty with the HSE in this regard and we have reported on that matter previously. However, there is a much more serious problem that is not fully accounted for in the figures. In addition, many agencies are not included within the terms of Circular 40/02. As a result, there is probably more non-compliant procurement in the system than is included in the chapter.

For the past couple of years, I have been trying to draw the attention of the committee to situations in which there is material non-compliance. I have made comments about procurement in audit certificates in respect of a number of entities. The committee members will have seen that, as we look at the listing of statements. In general, there probably is an assumption made that because we report on something, everything else is fine. However, that does not take account of the scale of our operation. We report by exception. We carry out specific pieces of work in a year, which is not the same as stating there is a general presumption that everything else is fine. We state that this is what we have found regarding the piece we have examined and that there are problems. We are trying to identify systemic issues and to draw them to the attention of the system as a feedback in order that the system can learn. I have no doubt that Accounting Officers have looked at some things we have reported with regard to other Votes or entities and have made changes to address some of the same problems within their own operations on which we have not reported.