Mr. Brian Purcell:

This is precisely why we carried out the audit. As I said in my opening statement, the Department took over the administration of the charitable lotteries fund in the middle of 2011. In light of what was going on at that time with regard to general Government expenditure and the expenditure of individual Departments and agencies, I think it would have been prudent for the Department, in the context of the overall review it was doing, to conduct a review of all lines of expenditure within the Department, which is what we were doing. As the Deputy will recall from her experience in the Committee of Public Accounts, a comprehensive expenditure review was carried out at the time by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. This would have been a follow-on from a part of that process as it applied to the Department of Justice and Equality, so it would have been entirely prudent to carry out that audit at the time.