Mr. Ronnie Downes:

I would not put it in those terms. We have ongoing discussion and engagement with Departments. The Department of Health, for example, has a budget of €21 billion and it is its own job to manage that money. Particular critical issues will come to our attention from time to time. We tend to focus on key priority issues. It is on these that we engage. If we have particular concerns about value for money or non-delivery, we will focus on those issues. There are also other processes that support us on an ongoing year-to-year basis and help us to get an understanding of what is working well and what is not going so smoothly in particular areas. We have to prioritise our focus towards those areas from time to time. For example, to take the year just gone, although it was, of course, not a typical year, we had extensive and intensive engagement with colleagues in the Department of Health on issues such as the arrangements with private hospitals to secure extra capacity during the course of 2020 and expenditure on personal protective equipment, PPE, and how such PPE was being procured and expended. We also engaged with the Department in respect of its engagements with nursing homes and the kinds of special measures that needed to be put in place to protect people and standards in those facilities. We also engaged with regard to some other issues regarding the overall trend in expenditure and whether it was above or below profile.

There is a range of tools available to us. Some are at the technical level. At the start of each year, Departments put in place a profile of expenditure showing how they expect expenditure to roll out month to month. We engage closely with them on that. Other issues are more policy-specific. A particular priority may be associated with a particular topic or we may be aware of a difficulty we want to explore in more detail. That is how things move forward. There is an understanding and implicit assumption that when Departments are allocated a given amount of money to achieve certain objectives, we give them sanction or permission to spend the money for that purpose but that it up to them to make it happen. We cannot monitor each and every project and microproject but we can monitor things in general terms and zero in on the areas that are of more concern to us.