Mr. Liam Woods:

The Chairman's point is well made. There is actually a strong system of governance and accountability operating, and it is well documented. However, as you rightly point out, there can be breaches or alleged breaches that are significant matters of concern. From our point of view, as I said in the opening statement and I will ask my colleagues in internal audit to say more on it, we audit our compliance internally and we are audited externally by the Comptroller and Auditor General. That brings to light issues within procurement where we must take action to rectify them.

To make another point on the general context, we have also developed a document called "One Voice for Health Sector Procurement" with some third party support. It is an integration of the buying between voluntary and statutory entities in the HSE. The observation in the opening statement that goods contracted in the future for St. Vincent's Hospital or any other public entity will be part of wider contracts is in support of the recommendation of the Comptroller and Auditor General in the chapter referred to in the 2013 report.

We must also consider what we must do to ensure that the rule set in complied with, how failures occur and what happens when we see those. In terms of compliance, management review is the first point of responsibility. Then there is internal audit and external audit. Regarding where there is alleged collusion or collusion between parties internally and externally, and I will return to the detail of Deputy Troy's questions shortly, to refer to the point made by Deputy Ó Caoláin it is correct that ordering of goods is not unique to procurement. In the HSE there is wide scale distributed ordering of goods. Indeed, one of the audit recommendations we would face as a challenge is that being such a distributed organisation the segregation of duties can be difficult at times, because we do not always have people in remote locations to sign off in the three way reference the Deputy mentioned with our colleague from the Beacon clinic. To be blunt, where there is collusion or alleged collusion we require extra vigilance and we must learn from any such incidents.

The rule set is there to give a general assurance that we have good procedures in place. The practices we must engage in after that are constant reviews. Regarding incidents such as this, I will speak in detail later in the answers to questions on what we have done since we saw this incident. It is referred to in my statement. Of course, we must act, and act with great vigilance and urgency to ensure this is not happening at a wider level. We would share a concern regarding a requirement for constant vigilance in this area. This is not solely a procurement issue, and I take that point on board.

I will ask my colleague from internal audit to say a little more about the financial governance and internal audit component of that.