Mr. William Beausang:

The specific progress that has been made is the work we have done with the European Commission to set up this project under the structural reforms support service initiative. That was something that we had in our mind as we looked at the way forward. That is a very significant response to the deficits in financial reporting that the Comptroller and Auditor General highlights in this report, and it will be an important and, indeed, critical part of our response to that issue.

While I am not criticising the IMF's work, typically, it has a team over for a week or two, it is high level, it looks at best practice and says this is the direction of travel of what we should be trying to do in terms of fiscal transparency and fiscal reporting. For a system as complex and as large as the Government accounting system, we need a deep-dive, granular analysis to come to a clearer view of what is involved in mapping what we do currently against detailed international accounting standards to find the gaps with a view to following through on those.