Ms Mairéad Dolan:

Committee members may recall that when we were last here, talking about accounts in October 2015, we provided a fairly detailed paper on a three-year targeted review of all heads of tax across the HSE that we did in conjunction with Revenue, which resulted in payment at the time. What we do now is that, every year, we have a couple of central tax people who report in to my role. We now do a targeted review, which is a continuation of the risk-based review, where we pick a sample every year and we go through all of the major items where we might consider that we had seen risks before. We work with our colleagues across the HSE and with the Revenue and we do our own internal audit of a very detailed sample. Over the past couple of years, that work has created a significant amount of visibility across the organisation of the need to be compliant. It therefore has reduced the level of non-compliance and therefore the level of payments that we would have had to make to the Revenue in the past number of years. The amount of tax that the HSE actually pays has now reduced very significantly as a result of that work.