Mr. Michael Flynn:

Yes. I am a HSE employee, as are my team. We report directly to the chairman of the audit committee, who is an external person and a very senior chartered accountant. I also have a strong reporting line to the director general of the HSE.

We conduct a programme of audits every year throughout the HSE. We also audit some of the funded agencies on a programme of audits. We have approximately 40 staff in internal audit within the HSE, all dedicated to the work of internal audit. I am pleased that over the last six to nine months we have received sanction to increase that number and we have recruited a number of new staff, including a number of people with specific investigation skills. We are building up the number of internal audit staff.

We look at procurement, payroll, income, cash and other such areas throughout the HSE. As one can imagine, it is a very diffuse organisation and there are many entities within it. However, we visit the hospitals, the primary care locations. We look at the backroom operations as well. We produce a number of reports every year. Most of our reports would have adverse findings in respect of improvements that could be made to the controls we have, and procurement would be no different in that regard. A number of our reports would contain recommendations for improving controls over procurement. Our work is reported to the audit committee and our findings also go to the leadership team of the HSE. We also regularly issue our audit reports under freedom of information to the media, so the work we do is widely commented on and is distributed throughout the organisation.

That is a thumbnail sketch of internal audit in the HSE. It is a stand-alone, dedicated function.