Mr. Paul Kenny:

My understanding is that the Financial Services Ombudsman contracts out some of the investigations, mainly to lawyers. That gives them a flexibility to expand and contract as the number of complaints changes. The Senator may have noticed in our statistics that we had a larger number of complaints in 2012 than we had in 2013. In terms of files opened, we only opened 463 last year as against 601 the previous year, but in 2008, at the height of the bust, we opened 758 files. The general collapse is what triggered a spike in the number of complaints because many people left the public service, for example, and a few mistakes were made in that regard. In one exercise the Health Service Executive, HSE, lost approximately 2,000 people, but in the process of doing that it prepared 17,000 illustrations for people who wanted to know what they would get if they left.

It was almost inevitable in that context that mistakes would be made, because everything was being done in a huge hurry. My understanding is that people were working until midnight and pitching up again at 9 o'clock the following morning.