Mr. Jim Breslin:

There are different models. One could be the Secretary General and Accounting Officer in a Department like the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection where one employs all the staff and owns all the system. I often think that think that this would give me a direct line into things but I guess that if I was in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, it would also be a scale issue. The more usual one - certainly in the health sector - is that we are an Accounting Officer and then we have bodies underneath, with the largest being the HSE. Our duty is to satisfy ourselves that the monitoring systems and procedures in those bodies are adequate and if information comes to light that they are not, to ensure that this information is acted upon and improvements made.