Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

The way my role is set up in law is that I am independent in the choice of matters on which I report. As I said earlier, 75% of the resources of my office are dedicated to financial audit work. The amount of resource we have available for what is discretionary, the reporting side, is limited. Given that we have to do the financial audits, this gets the first cut of resources. It is always a struggle to have sufficient resources to investigate the matters I consider should be investigated.

In the main, we identify topics in two ways. First, when carrying out the financial audit when we are inside organisations, we may find issues about which we are concerned. If we see that a major capital project that has been running for a number of years is not making the progress it should, we would flag it as something we should consider for reporting. We have a list of 140 to 160 issues that would potentially be something to examine, but it is impractical for us to get to all of them. We have to make choices, and we make them on a rolling basis.

There is provision for the Committee of Public Accounts to communicate with me, as Comptroller and Auditor General, and draw a matter to my attention which I should consider. The tradition in the past was that if the committee was minded that there was something important, it would be very difficult for me to say I was not going to do it, assuming it was in my area of responsibility. Over the years, when matters have generated a certain amount of public interest or there has been ongoing public concern, I would have taken it into consideration in my choices about what was prioritised. An example is when we examined the funding around SIPTU and training courses a number of years ago. We carried out the examination because we felt we could assist with bringing information into the public domain.

I am happy to engage with the committee and understand what its concerns are. Given that I am here every week, I listen to what members are asking and what the focus is. I get an understanding from them, which reflects what is happening with citizens generally as to what is important and what is of concern. We try to do work that speaks to those concerns, answers them and brings information which may be helpful to the committee and members of the public.