Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

We carry out many audits that relate to natural resources and farming in general, including environmental matters. One of my earlier audits was on water policies and the CAP and the ways in which they interacted. We have looked at the effectiveness of the spend, the reimbursement systems, procurement - pretty much every element. One aspect of the rural development programmes we find is that one can have too many objectives. We find this in many different audits. If one has a single objective for a particular programme, it will probably have some impact. However, if one says that money may be received by a beneficiary and then one provides a list of several different things, that becomes more of a transfer of money than something that has particular purpose. At a political level, one might think that the transfer of funds from urban to rural areas or from Europe in general to outlying areas is perfectly correct. However, from an auditor's point of view, if one examines the effectiveness of the programme, one examines in particular the objectives of that programme and one may say a particular objective was not met.

Regarding RDP issues in general, we often find that things need to be simpler but we often also find, frankly, that the programmes do not deliver on the particular purpose for which they were set up. I ask the committee to forget the current young farmer's scheme and consider the old young farmer's scheme, for example - the RDP element of it rather than the scheme in general. One might say that a large number of young farmers receive some funding, but was there a real change in the transfer of farm holdings from older to younger farmers? We look at the objective that was assigned to the programme. Other elements, such as the impact on a rural area of the overall amount of funds transferred, can be very important too, but that is not typically what we look at. Compliance with the RDP is problematic. It tends to have a higher error rate. We will talk about this a little later in the day at the other committee. However, Ireland has no special problems. When we carry out our overall audit, in a given year there will typically be eight or ten cases in Ireland, sometimes fewer, sometimes more. We have no special pattern of problems in the Irish cases. If anything, not in this audit but in the 2015 audit we examined four or five Irish cases and found no errors at all. These are all positives. These were probably single payment cases. There were no particular issues or problems for Ireland. Generally speaking, the Irish system seems to be well administered. There were problems a number of years ago with the land parcel identification system, which I know caused trouble then. We talked about recoupment. Some problems with recoupment arose, but we have not found those problems more recently.