Ms Mary Hurley:

I guess the money would have been spent on something else. It may have been spent on something else in the local authority. I think the controls are such that because we audit the various schemes, it would have been caught. For instance, in addition to our internal audit we have an inspection system within the Department that is totally separate and goes out on the ground. Eight individuals in our Department are checking projects. The Local Government Audit Service is also very active in terms of the type of work it does. The controls are such, and I rely on the controls to discover these issues. From my perspective in terms of compliance levels, when I look at compliance from the inspection services in the Department, less than 1% of projects are non-compliant, so there is a fairly robust system in place.