Mr. John Field:

We aspire at all times to do things in accordance with best practice. We have made our best efforts to give assurances to the committee on this, and in fairness to Deputy McDonald, she has expressed concern about assurance. We have tried to outline in our briefing paper that we have implemented robust processes and procedures and they are followed. I am satisfied on the evidence available to me that they are followed. I do not believe there is a pattern or culture that indicates otherwise.

In answer to Deputy McDonald's earlier question, the allegations made by persons B and C were made in general sense and there were not specifics. In the absence of specifics, we conducted a general review of travel and subsistence policy and its implementation within the university. We brought in Deloitte to audit, and we made available to it all of our expense claims from March 2014 to August 2015, which we felt covered the period of the allegations. Deloitte did not identify any issue. I wish to give that assurance that it was an independent review and the company was given access to every expense claim it went through in that period. Subsequent to the review being completed, in January 2016 persons B and C identified 69 specific transactions about which they raised concerns. We reviewed all those transactions. They were all ones which had been paid. They differed from person A's allegations in that they were paid rather than unpaid. They also differed in that persons B and C did not raise issues about having difficulty in getting them signed off, because as we have outlined, we changed the approval process so that it was an entirely online process. The expense claim must be approved online or it does not progress to the next step and will not get paid.