Mr. John McKeon:

We covered some of this earlier. It was also covered at length by my predecessor, the then Secretary General, in 2016. There was no single business case document. Looking back, one sees that there should have been, but there was not. The reason for that was explained at the time and related to how the public services card project had evolved going back to 1993. There are difficulties involved in estimating benefits in particular. Most of the elements of a business case were in place in different documents, but were not compiled in one place. I acknowledge that it would have been preferable to have everything in one document, and said as much in my letter. However, such a document was not put together and there is no point pretending it was. We have to acknowledge that it was not. For the purposes of this committee meeting, I have tried to set out the marginal and incremental costs we have incurred.

We would have incurred a lot of costs in any event, which I explained earlier. It is about €37 million. The benefits we have accrued to date are about €20 million. Those benefits will be ongoing-----