Mr. Charlie McCreevy:

Well, they're ... they got money from various independent bodies around the world because they were ... they didn't take any money from the EU Commission, for example, or any government organisation. They had very eminent people involved with them, such as Mr. Paul Volcker and people like that, because they want to be seen to be clearly independent because, you see, they would see it and rightly so that, you know ... that you shouldn't have influence in setting accounting standards from anybody, that it should speak definitively, coldly, etc., etc.

So they fund themselves. They got ... you see they don't need an awful lot of money to keep going. But the small amount of money, so they've always guarded their independence jealously. But ... and they have a wide consultation process, they don't come up in the middle of the night and say "We're having a standard here." They go through an exhausting operation that might go on two or three years. And bodies from all over the world are represented in various fora there. And the process they go through is exhaustive, could go on for three or four years and everybody gets a chance to comment about it. But, I just ... some people have commented that some of the IFRS standards have contributed to this.