Mr. Tony Murphy:

-----results based route, there again one is moving away from cost reimbursement because what one is saying then is that one has an agreement amount and if one achieves the results, one is entitled to the money. In a way, it is almost entitlement-based as well.

It is not only the same old same old, although I have to say that if I was reading it I would not be surprised that we have the same type of errors year after year - ineligible cost. It is the same thing, despite the fact that we make recommendations and the Commission is continually trying to educate or train the relevant audit authorities in the member states. That is also an issue, probably not here. In some member states, they have significant issues in terms of the administrative capacity, competence and turnover of staff. That is a contributing factor to the general problem we have in terms of errors. I am not saying it is the case here.

We have 3% errors. Cohesion generally is an area where, because it is mainly cost reimbursement, we find many errors. As I explained earlier, here it is a little disappointing that we have an error rate of 3.6% because we are auditing transactions which have already been audited by the audit authorities. We were trying to go down the attestation route where we could rely on the work of the auditor authorities because we wanted to reduce the administrative burden so that there were not four or five sets of auditors turning up at some beneficiary such as some guy in Leitrim where he is getting a visit from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, a visit from the European Commission and a visit from the Court of Auditors. That is what we are trying to avoid but it is disappointing nonetheless that we still have an error rate of 3.6% on transactions which, in theory at least, have been through the control system.