Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I keep coming back to the statement on internal financial control. Internal audits and the consideration of those reports by the audit committee are key internal financial controls. There is space for all public bodies to give more information about the internal audit programme they carry out, its completeness and so on. In fairness to the HSE, many of its internal audit reports are published. I am unclear as to whether that is as a result of freedom of information requests but it produces approximately 50 reports per year, some on individual grant-funded agencies and others on internal HSE systems, controls and the operation thereof. Where possible, it has been willing to make those reports public and sometimes puts them on its website. There may be specific problems with reports involving an allegation of fraud and such reports are trickier to handle than where there was a looseness in terms of spending but there was no fraud involved.