Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Exactly. There are what one might call the pure technical accounting issues which we are fairly much on top of and I would like to see more co-operation and more parallel auditing, as we are doing in Trinity, with some of the others.

I would say though that there are other issues that arise that a commercial auditor may not normally deal with, for instance, things like sanction for allowances, our focus on procurement in the sector and the whistleblower issues that have arisen. Where those kind of things arise, we find ourselves needing to probe them in significant detail and that very much slows down then the completion of the financial audit. We cannot really close a financial audit until we have bottomed out all of those or at least are satisfied that there is something that we can come back to the following year. If explanations are required or if there is a particular accounting issue that needs to be resolved, that can protract the audit significantly.

I suppose we have generally a good working relationship with the finance units within the colleges but once one moves into areas, let us say, where there is more academic involvement in explaining what has happened, or it could be a HR department or whatever; the explanations tend to be more complex; there is not a system in place readily; they are not familiar with why we are asking or what we are asking; and so on. We could have several rounds of iteration in trying to get the information that we require so that we can be satisfied on the regularity and the propriety end of things, and that has given rise to delay in some cases.

One of the things which did cause a delay as well in recent years was we put a bit of emphasis on looking at how accounting for research is done within the universities, in particular, looking at sub-accounts for specific research projects. We found that there was a need for certain improvements to be made there - earlier recognition of income and surpluses being brought back and recognised as income in the universities. That has led to delays in a number of cases.