Mr. Barry Quinlan:

The late filing of the accounts was down to work pressures. I joined the Department last year when there was a major emergency response issue and it came down to those matters. They should have been filed earlier and in future they will be but there were delays last year and a lot of it was down to that emergency response. I was dealing with the security of oil and things like that a lot last year so it just came down to that.

The accounts were checked in the Department and that was missed. They go through a process where they are summarised and they would have come into the Department having been signed off and approved by the Comptroller and Auditor General so we would not do another audit but we would check them. We are reviewing our processes for that just to make sure that eventualities like this will be picked up in the future.