Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The NAS was probably based on a model similar to An Garda Síochána, where members are centrally trained and then distributed around the country, but we are in a very different employment market. On the role of the NAS, there are other private operators it is competing with as a potential employer. That degree of flexibility is very important.

I am jumping around here; I often think we should have a standing committee of public accounts just for the €23 billion the HSE spends, but that might fill the representatives with horror. I will come to the issue of non-compliant procurement. A process was carried out, which was a self-assessment exercise, to determine the level of non-compliant procurement. Within that, I was alarmed that compliance assessments were not completed in respect of 13% of the procurement expenditure, when the scoping exercise was carried out.

That was either because a manager responsible for the expenditure could not be readily identified or the manager failed to respond to the exercise. That is quite alarming when we are looking at a process to establish non-compliant procurement. Would our guests respond to that in the time remaining?