Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

When we discussed this previously, I mentioned there has been a substantial change since 2009. That year was a bit of a turning point because that was when concern arose about matters in FÁS. We recognised at that stage that we needed to do something fundamentally different in our financial audits if we were to identify similar situations in other organisations. At that stage, we instituted a different approach and added onto the normal financial audit testing, whereby we specifically target issues of propriety. There is now a long schedule of matters, including remuneration of chief executives and chief officers, expenses, credit card policy, procurement, capital projects and financial reporting to audit committees and boards, etc. I think there are 14 or 15 items on the list.

When we were looking at travel and subsistence claims during the period prior to 2009, we would have taken a sample across the whole organisation. The sample would have been drawn from the full spectrum of charges. I have to say that in general, we did not find many problems with it in Waterford. I think there were other reviews of expenditure in Waterford over that period, including the Deloitte report which looked at other expenses in Waterford and found it was generally clean. Under the system of governance laid down in the code, which was being applied in Waterford, an internal review of the effectiveness of controls is required every year. I think it was generally coming up fairly clean in Waterford. It is probably quite an unusual and unexpected thing to find. There were problems in Waterford, obviously, but they were confined in a very narrow sphere.