Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

At the end of each audit of a set of financial statements, the staff at my office prepare a report for the management, bring to its attention control issues, control weaknesses and matters we consider management is required to address and where it needs to make changes to the control systems as necessary.

The procedure in general is that the points raised by us are put to management and we ask it for a response. We require it to go on record as to what it will do about these issues. They are incorporated in the management letter and it is then formally sent to the chief executive officer of the HSE, as in this case. It stands then as a record between us of actions we require.

In a subsequent financial audit, we would look at the actions it has undertaken to take to see whether it actually made the changes it committed to make. In the normal way, that document would not be published. It is not published by us. If there was a control weakness which we felt was important and it was not addressed in a timely way, I could then reflect on it and consider that a report should be published and action taken. That is basically the origin of the document. As I understand it, the material that came into the public domain was a draft being prepared by it to respond to our recommendations. It is not a complete document from its side. There is quite a bit of material there and not everything has the same weight or importance but certainly there are issues on which we felt action was required from it and we would expect to see that action undertaken.