Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Year on year, we have reported consistently that the HSE has not been competitively procuring a significant proportion of its procurements of goods and services.

The figures that are included relate to samples that we took. In other words, we looked at these samples. We cannot take a representative sample. Every year, the samples we take consistently indicate that there is a significant amount of non-competitive, non-compliant procurement happening. Effectively, because the HSE never built a single financial system or a single procurement system it has a decentralised procurement system. Many parts of the HSE are undertaking procurement and a lot of it is not compliant with normal rules. By comparison, in other organisations which have simpler structures than the HSE, there would be better visibility of procurement and expenditure because, effectively, they are operating on one accounting system or one financial management system. We are better able to take a sample from that system on a random basis. More recently, many of the Departments have developed a comprehensive database of all the procurement they undertake and they signal on it whether procurement was competitively or non-competitively procured and, in the latter case, the reason for non-competitive procurement. As a result, they are better able to manage and account for the compliance of the procurement they are undertaking. Undoubtedly, the HSE is one of the biggest and most complex organisations in the country but this is a problem that we have been signalling for nearly a decade at this stage. Some progress is being made, but there is certainly a lot more scope for improvement.