Kieran O'Donnell (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The opening statement at page 8 refers to:

Monitoring actual spend against monthly profiles based on information submitted by the Department to DPER's Vote section so as to keep track of aggregate spend by each Department compared to planned spend. DPER does not monitor expenditure at the individual project level.

Am I correct that the Department's reporting structure would not have picked this up because the €191 million was a definite increase in cost that probably had not been incurred yet, and the €200 million was increases in scale, as argued by BAM, the contractors? Effectively, the Department was just looking at profile versus spending and, given the design of its monitoring process, it would not have picked that up. Am I correct in that?