Ms Hilary Murphy-Fagan:

This is a complex programme and it has an industrial risk management process that flags where items are behind schedule and there are quality concerns. In a programme of this scale, these are normal risks that are managed, but in this case they were increasing rather than decreasing. A decision was taken at that stage that, rather than pushing ahead with the timeline for users to commence testing the system, we would pause, examine the system and the issues and understand better what the concerns and issues were that remained to be resolved. That work commenced at the end of 2018 and took until mid-2019. During that time, a detailed review of all the open concerns and issues in respect of the system's design was carried out with subject matter experts from many Departments. There were multiple workshops, an examination of the issues and consideration of what needed to change in the design in order to address the concerns.

It is now clear that the programme originally underestimated the level of change in standardisation that was required to move from a cash accounting system to an accrual accounting one. That was the fundamental issue. There was also another matter-----