Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

We did that kind of exercise previously. There are two ways of looking at it. The Department tends to look at savings over expenditure that is prevented as a result of the control activity. With the fraud and error surveys we are trying to get at the baseline to identify how much payment in excess of entitlement there might be in the system. I believe the fraud and error surveys can be used to give a picture. If it is designed well enough, it should be representative of what the claim load is in the year, albeit that there is a lot of turnover in it. When we did that exercise about three or four years ago, the figure was around the order of the figure that one calculates each year as being the savings as a result of control activity. There is always a risk that there is going to be excess payment in the system or payments in error. There is further scope to use the fraud and error survey to get at a figure of that underlying problem, which then puts the effectiveness of the control activity into context.