Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Like all other Government Departments and offices, we have a staffing limit which we cannot exceed. Therefore, one is always trying to approach it from underneath. We try to staff up as much as possible so we can use the maximum level of resources available to us. While the limit is 165 members, we are operating at approximately 140. Turnover in the office has increased during recent years. For the past couple of years, the staff turnover has been approximately 13% to 14%, which is quite high. It is difficult to maintain a workforce and have the right people in the right places at the right time. It means we must invest a large amount of resource in training. Mr. Billy Carrie has been heading up our training and professional development unit during recent years, and we constantly invest in it. There is quite a demand for the skill set that many of our staff members have and they find opportunities outside. This is what gives rise to the turnover.

We use two techniques to address some of the gaps. We take in professional, qualified accountancy staff from agencies to slot in and fill places on the audit teams. A challenge this may give us is that, very often, people coming from a private sector background may not have an appreciation of public sector issues and concerns. Our audit goes considerably beyond a standard private sector audit. We have much more emphasis on regularity matters, which is that transactions are done in accordance with the law, and, due to the interest of the Committee of Public Accounts, much more emphasis on governance and propriety matters. We regularly report on those. While drawing resources from outside is a short-term solution, a better solution is more permanent staff.

We contract out some of the work. One of the features of the public sector is that almost all agencies operate on a calendar year accounting basis. This means everybody finishes their accounting year in December and all the accounts are due for delivery to us in February, March and April, when we get a huge peak in demand for our work. As well as contracting out and in, we try to manage this peak as best we can. We are not always able to get to every entity in April or May. Some have to be deferred until June or July, whereas we get the bigger, higher value accounts dealt with early on. The bigger accounts include the Central Bank, National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, and the Revenue. We have managed to bring the finance accounts forward.

There are certain implications with respect to the way we are resourced and that has an effect on the delivery of financial statements to the committee. It can expect to see smaller entities' accounts coming in later in the year rather than them all coming in together by the end of June.

On the issue of data management, I have learned the difficulty involved in getting briefing notes on briefing notes and telephone books are presented to me. I have three folders of material with me today. I sympathise with the challenge the committee has in preparing for these meetings. The way in which everybody accesses information is changing. We absorb information better now in a more visual way. We are looking at ways of summarising information and at graphical ways to present text which will the give members information at their fingertips without forcing them to read pages of text to figure out what is going on. That is just a suggestion. That works for me but it may not work for the members, or it may some but not for others. It could be that a face-to-face briefing between the members and Billie Carrie, where they would have a conversation with him before the meeting, might be best way to help them to quickly understand the key issues in a set of financial statements or in a report. We will just have to see what works. I am quite happy to get feedback from committee if it does not work for them or if they think something different would work. We will try to find ways of assisting them.