Mr. Liam O'Reilly:

No, it was identified by Deloitte that there were some concerns over how the calculation was working. In early 2015, the executive committee of the university undertook to take action to rewrite that part of the system. In parallel to that, they implemented a checking system that would check the output. It was to re-implement, write a detailed specification, agree the specification and implement the specification. In parallel, they commissioned a separate piece of work to check the outputs of the newly implemented system. That was implemented as the new part of the system in December 2015. It and the checker that goes along with it have been used to process all the semester results for every semester since 2015. Various measures have been taken and that is an example of one of the biggest measures to mitigate some of the risks.

Following that, there were multiple other risks identified with some of how the IT systems were managed and some of the business processes. The business process issues were mainly to do with the amount of manual intervention and checking that had to happen as opposed to just trusting the system output. Probably more staff than one might expect had to do more manual checks to check outputs. A budget was set aside and a project was envisaged to take a number of years to address these risks. In order to undertake that exercise, the university needed to scale up significantly on the resource side in terms of internal staff to be able to engage with the project and, additionally, it needed to be able to select an external party that would have expertise in the management of extensive projects. This was a large change programme. These projects are large in nature. They are expensive, take time and are complex.

A tender was run. The first tender did not yield any responses. It was run through the all-of-government framework. The tender was amended and tailored to get more interest in the market and was re-run. The second time it was run, seven or eight companies tendered for it. Four were shortlisted and went through a detailed, rigorous public sector procurement process that resulted in Clarion, which was mentioned earlier, winning the tender. Following contract negotiation, Clarion signed a contract with the University of Limerick in February of last year. We are engaged with Clarion on that project under a governance committee that has some of the most senior people across the university engaged in various projects that will deal with the risks identified in the report, including the detailed historical review of the records. There are multiple strands to the project. It is complex and large. We are under way and are engaged in it. It is not all planned out. It is complex and is going to cost a lot of money.