Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

The way we tend to look at it is that rushed expenditure at the end of the year would pose a risk and so we would be looking to see that there is a consistent pattern in the spending. It may be different if you are talking about capital funding. Once a contract is entered into, even if it does not progress, the commitment is there and is going to have to be met for the following year. There are a couple of different risks there and nobody has specifically raised that one, namely, that you only have this expenditure and it must be done this year. If you legitimately enter a contract for a service and the service extends over a number of years, the commitment will have to be met from subsequent years' allocations. It may reduce the scope then for further commitments to be entered into the following year but the control is supposed to apply and it is there for a purpose. If the Deputy has examples of cases that were raised, we could have a look at them and see if we can come back to the committee with a better understanding of the issues that arise.