Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome Mr. Cardiff and his delegation and thank them for their ongoing communications with this committee. Like the Chairman, I acknowledge and thank Mr. Cardiff and his team for their assistance during our visit to the Court of Auditors earlier this year.

On the over-declaration of land, I have mixed views about this. In effect, a particular block of money was set aside to assist farming, particularly in rural and isolated areas. It was part of the support of the principle of assisting people in rural Ireland in maintaining family farms, ensuring they have a basic level of income and maintaining the countryside in an environmentally acceptable way. Year on year there has been an increase in the number of small areas of land that have been identified as not having forage on them and have become covered in trees and so on. This is now considered a major breach and, depending on the size of it, is impacting on farmers' ability to draw down funds. Farmers are being penalised with fines and so on despite that in many cases they sought professional advice in the original mapping exercise of the area. This process, when commenced, was very basic in that the land was walked and measurements were taken. This is now being compared against satellite imaging. This has resulted in farmers having to take significant cuts in funding in conjunction with increased penalties.

While I do not question the work of the Court of Auditors in this regard from a policy point of view, we need to review what we are trying to achieve by way of the funds being provided to farmers and farm families. Rather than penalising them for what I believe are minor technical breaches, we need to have a rethink in this regard. I accept this is outside the control of the Court of Auditors as the policy is enshrined and it must do its audit and identify the mismatch between what is declared and not declared. It is stated on page 19 that failures to respect public procurement rules account for more than half the error rate in this spending area. Perhaps Mr. Cardiff would elaborate on that.

Are we to assume that these are procurement errors by State agencies, or is it a sub-layer below that, such as community enterprises or NGOs that are receiving State funding, that are failing to follow procurement rules, or is it at a higher level? Is it the case that some Departments are failing to recognise or respect the public procurement rules? If there is any breakdown by sector, that would be helpful. If not, perhaps Mr. Cardiff could provide it to us at a later stage.