Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Yes. One of my objectives in doing the Chapter was to surface this issue. The figure for the Department of Education and Skills is substantial. We have reported previously on overpayments to teachers. The point was made last week that in a large payroll administration there will be overpayments from time to time. It is not news that there is some level of overpayment in any organisation. The difficulty was that with the introduction of shared services there appeared to be an increase across the board in the overpayments that were being recorded. That is why I decided to focus on what was happening in national shared services. The framework that we were using for analysing it could be used by any of the State bodies, including the HSE or the Department of Education and Skills in regard to the teachers' payroll, to review their own systems and to identify ways that they could prevent overpayments occurring so that the minimum necessary amount of overpayment is incurred.