Mr. Barry Lowry:

I cannot speak for every public service system, but I have been designing IT systems for more years than I care to remember. The obligation from day one was that key systems, especially systems that dealt with sensitive or public data, had audit trails within them whereby it was possible to produce reports on who had input which information. I expect that most of the high profile, sensitive systems that power the State have similar measures in place. Certainly in the examples we discussed earlier the computer systems and the audit trails of those systems played a big part in identifying individuals who made errors. That is what one would expect of a computer system. All high profile computer systems are subject to various programmes of audit, and one of the key objectives of an audit is to assess the risk of data breach or data misuse.