Dr. Fergal Lynch:

The focus has been on the highest risk to the Exchequer. The compliance visits were focused on the larger providers to which we were paying out more money, and specifically on the schemes where most of this difficulty arose, which were the CCS and related schemes. It is important to stress that we started from a very different perspective, which was to try to assist childcare providers to provide a reasonable level of service with a certain level of State money that was relatively modest at the time. That has grown significantly since then. The system has become more sophisticated, even to the extent - at last - of a proper computer-based system to capture everything. The sector we were dealing with, especially the CCS where the difficulty arose, would have involved small, not-for-profit providers.