Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I wish to make a point. There is a difficulty with sampling in the HSE. Since there are different procurement and financial systems, it is not possible to take a random sample across the entire organisation and test it. If we were able to do that, the figures that would come out could be scaled up as being representative of the entire organisation. However, we have to pick certain operational units and examine procurement at a local level. The figures that come out and changes in the figures from year to year are not necessarily indicative of a trend. There may be trends in the data but we cannot tell what those trends are. It could be that the situation across the HSE improves from year to year but because of the way we have to sample, it may look like it got worse. That is a difficulty in interpreting the figures.