Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

We had a large number of relatively small historical debts under some of the old schemes where we would have overpaid people and found it difficult to recover them. We made significant progress in setting up a new debt management system in the Department. As we now have a central debt management unit, all of these debts are being managed through it, whereas in the past they were dealt with by individual divisions. We have a systematic way of determining whether something should be written off.