Mr. P. J. Fitzpatrick:

I will take the issue of pay first and deal with the two matters separately. When the implementation body was set up first, we decided very deliberately on the issue of pay bill savings that we would use the figures of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. Those are the figures that are provided to the troika and, as far as we are concerned, those are the only official figures. Otherwise, we could have had a situation where we would get sectors giving us one set of figures, the Department's figures would be different, and the figures would be all over the place. For that reason, we decided very deliberately from the outset that we were going to use only those figures, and those are the figures we have used on pay.

The non-pay figures are sent to us with the review by the Secretaries General from each Department. We have to accept those because, obviously, we cannot go out and check each one of them. However, last year we did engage accountants to verify - I would not call it a full audit - the four sets of savings that had been reported to us, and this year we had a different set of accountants who verified four projects. In all eight of those projects they verified that the savings that had been reported or had been achieved were being achieved or would be achieved, were based on accurate information and that they were satisfied that where there were forward judgments, the assumptions underpinning them were sound. To begin to audit everything would become so expensive that it would-----