Mr. John McKeon:

We will certainly send on the terms of reference of the independent review. They cover the matters Deputy Brady spoke about and the communications issue which the Chairman raised. We will be happy to circulate them. I am just waiting for the Commissioner to come back and sign off on them. As soon as he does, I will send them on. I do not see a difficulty but he is travelling this week, albeit I do not know if that is out of the country. In any event, I will be talking to him next week and as soon as the terms of reference are signed off, we will send them to the committee. We will not have a difficulty with them being published in due course. As to the timing, we hope to have the report by the end of the year. While that is our intention, the most important thing is to get it done properly. This has been a big project which was two years in the making and there is a huge amount of paperwork on programme report systems, design and testing. We will have to interview and talk to everyone involved. I will take the Commissioner's opinion on how much time he needs to do it properly rather than to rush to an outcome. The important thing here is the learnings. We hope it will be done by the end of the year, however.

I was asked about the consultants. The system was designed and built by a specialist firm of consultants which was procured by open tender. That is certainly one of the issues we will be looking at as part of the review. I am the Accounting Officer of the Department and I am accountable for operations. I must account for this. I am not looking to transfer responsibility in any way. However, I am certainly very keen to determine what could and should have been done better in that space. That will form part of it.

I was asked about arrears. We are running a routine this week to try to pick up those who have not received arrears payments. However, I cannot give the Deputy the absolute and categoric assurance he sought as one never knows until it is done. However, we are hopeful that this week or next week, which is the wording I used earlier, they will get their arrears. We are still working on that. If there are cases about which members know, they can give them to me. The sooner they do so, the better it will be. It may be that there are issues which are systemic, albeit we believe we have identified and sorted them all out. However, if there are issues of which we are not aware, I ask members to get them to us as soon as possible as that will improve the prospect of resolution.