Ms Hilary Murphy-Fagan:

Absolutely. The chart of accounts was pivotal to this. I will try to describe it. It is like starting to build a house with two bedrooms, wanting to extend it to include new rooms upstairs and downstairs and then discovering that the steel support system for the house is not in place. We had to make sure that the foundations were really solid before we took things forward. I took external advice on this. A number of experts gave us their views because, clearly, the options we were considering involved value for money and what were the most economically advantageous for the public service. We considered this, but the options were limited. We could have continued on against the timeline and let the system go live, but all of the best advice I received since stated that would have been the wrong thing to do because we would have been trying to, in effect, fix an aeroplane in flight.