Mr. William Beausang:

One of the issues highlighted in the two red dots was recognising the accrued pension liabilities of public servants and a substantial programme of work has been undertaken in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform in light of an EU regulation to quantify our accrued pension liabilities. That was reported on late last year. It is work that is done every couple of years but now there is a more recent statement of accrued pension liabilities for public servants, which responds to this issue that the IMF highlighted that we did not have as good a handle on it as we should have.

The other issue that arose was the recognition of liabilities associated with PPPs, and although under EUROSTAT rules we are not required to report - EUROSTAT guides how we report in terms of PPPs - there is significantly more information available now on the liabilities that arise from PPPs and that is published and is in the public domain. Those are two gaps that the IMF identified, namely, PPPs and pension liabilities.