Ms Oonagh Fleming:

We met the stakeholder provider representatives as recently as last week and we have done that throughout the evolution of core funding. We have met them on a regular basis and we will be meeting again next week or the week after. We will continue to provide supports to providers to meet the financial reporting requirement.

To provide a bit of clarity, what is being sought is a trial balance. It is a list of income and expenditure. It is not monthly returns and it is not the detail underpinning those. It is the annualised amounts, and it is possible to extract that from existing accountancy packages. We have done as much as we can to meet the requirements of our sanction from the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform because core funding is a grant and it is covered under circular 13/2014. We sought a balancing act because we are aware of the different levels of financial accountability across this very diverse sector.