Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

We had a chapter last year in the 2014 account on redundancy and insolvency debts because we had a concern that there was this very large sum which was being treated as a contingent asset and whether the debt management of it was sufficiently progressive. The Department was always aware that a lot of this money would not be collected, and on that basis we were drawing attention to the fact that it had more or less stopped having write-offs of the debt so that the figure was incrementing every year but that there were not write-offs of what was effectively unrecoverable. We therefore made recommendations last year but we have been working with the Department for a number of years to try to get a better fix on who owes the money and what action the Department was taking on its recovery.