Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I can certainly go into it in more detail next week when I do a formal presentation around it. Almost all public sector bodies, with the exception of third level education bodies and one or two others, are on a calendar year basis. What we face, therefore, is a very highly peaked demand for work. There are a number of strategies that we try to follow to deal with that peak. One of the things we would like to do more of is audit testing in-year. It is called interim audit testing. That works quite well with the HSE, the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, and so on, that is, larger entities with bigger budgets and more transactions. Due to the fact that there are organisations that are in arrears, it is a bit of a job to shift the emphasis to carrying out the audit after delivery of the financial statements in total. That is one of the strategies, and it will take time to turn the ship and get into a more efficient situation.

The second thing we do is contract out a certain number of sets of financial statements for audit to private sector auditors. They carry out the audit work and report to me. I still issue the audit opinion, so we would have a certain amount of review. That helps us. It gives us additional resources at the time when the peak occurs. Those are the kind of strategies that we need to undertake.

Obviously, the first and most important issue for us is to get the financial statements delivered. We have been taking a harder line in recent years whereby if the financial statements are thrown in but they are not ready for the audit, we discount that. We do not regard that as having been received. They have to be ready for audit when they submit the financial statements, and then we try to schedule as optimally as possible. Realistically, however, without an enormous increase in the resource level, we could not have all the financial statements audited within, say, the first half of the year. That just would not be possible.