Ms Ita Mangan:

I accept that but it is a technical analysis. We could argue about every one of the assumptions in it. We could argue about the outputs in all cases but I do not know if we would ever reach any consensus. What I consider to be important is the best services that we can provide. I will address the matter of establishing a compliance unit. The Citizens Information Board was told by the Comptroller and Auditor General that it would have to carry out 31 audits annually on its 93 services. If we were to do that, we would need a compliance unit. I would regard a compliance unit as an incredible waste of money. All it would do would be to visit individual services to ensure that each was doing its accounts properly. A far better way would be to have a much smaller number of companies, we have opted for 16, which would require five audits annually, according to the Comptroller and Auditor General, and then we would not need a compliance unit because we could do that from existing resources.

On the use of the local managers' time and so on, as I said earlier in the case of MABS, the money advisers are doing some of the administrative work. That will not happen under the new structure. They will be providing money advice on a full-time basis, which is what they are qualified to do. The regional managers, the administration, the back-up, the HR and so on will be centralised so that the staff who deliver the services - including the volunteers who provide services within the citizens information services - will all be freed up to do nothing other than deliver those services. That is the thinking behind all of it. I keep repeating that we never did this for financial gain, but to improve governance and services. We provided the committee with our estimated costs in February. There are some minor differences between those and the figures contained in this cost-benefit analysis but we did not outline benefits in any financial sense because we did not consider that to be the major issue. All the other reports, including the Pathfinder report, dealt with these issues but I cannot see the value of our getting into the minutiae of the benefits of having regional managers available to do front-line work and so on. I do not see how the members of the committee or I can challenge all the figures without merely substituting our assumptions for those made by the professionals. This is a professionally produced report. Members can criticise it - I can criticise it myself - but the overall finding is that there are financial benefits, although, as I keep saying, we are not unduly concerned about that. Our focus is on the governance and delivery of services.