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And to add an element of menace, no doubt.

I will move on to another part of the report, which struck me as being quite an important piece of analysis that you have presented to us. In exhibit 4, you track the performance of various bodies over the past five years in taking action, or having the ability to take action, where errors or fraud are identified.

What is especially striking is the decline in satisfactory performance, particularly in local government and the national health service. Five years ago, the satisfactory performance rate in local government—which I presume relates to how its systems are working—was at around 80 per cent, but it is now down to 60 per cent. In the NHS, broadly speaking, five years ago, it was at 95 per cent, but it is now at 80 per cent. There has been considerable slippage there, has there not? Will you explain a bit more about what lies behind that?

Is the exercise not self-financing? In other words, if I employ three people to follow the work up, on salaries of £50,000 or £60,000 each, will I not get that money back because the work that they do will bring in revenue that was paid out in error or because of fraudulent claims?

Okay. I think that you described it earlier as something that we should view as a one-off exercise or a point-in-time exercise, but I presume that you have—I think that you mention this in the report—an on-going relationship with the bodies that you work with on the national fraud initiative. Can you tell us a little more about the dynamics of that, how it works and what you are doing to monitor the impact of the activity that you undertake in the exercise?

Thanks for that.

We now want to spend a bit of time on some of the specific areas that you drill down into in the report. To get us under way on that, I invite Graeme Simpson to put some questions to you.

I have a final question. When we discussed the adult concessionary bus travel arrangements earlier, Graham Simpson said that more than 1,000 people have used the bus passes of people who are deceased. For the record, it is fair to say that that was out of 99,600 people. In other words, 99 per cent of the population are entirely honest. Let us get some perspective on that.

However, I wonder about the extent to which you monitor the bus operators, because there are interesting considerations around whether the journeys that are charged for are the journeys that people have actually taken or whether there is a mismatch. For example, when you get off the bus, you are supposed to swipe your card to say, “This is the stop that I’m getting off at.” If you do not do that, what is the default position? Is it that the bus operator charges for a longer journey? I wonder whether that falls within the remit of the national fraud initiative or whether it is looked at somewhere else.

The appraisal form says that the training was for a new member of staff.

Jamie Greene has a final question.

Before we finish, I have a final question for Michelle Quinn and Kersti Berge. Kersti, you mentioned the reviews. There is an independent review into WICS and, interestingly, an internal review of the Government’s sponsorship arrangements. I do not know whether that should not be the other way round, to coin a phrase. Anyway, Parliament was told that certainly the independent review would be published by late summer. I know that we have had a nice week of weather, but we are coming towards the end of summer. When do we expect that report to come out?

Okay. Can you tell me about the examples that the Grant Thornton report unearthed, which were about employees who booked their own travel? For example, if I were to be called to a meeting in London tomorrow, or if I needed to get to Stornoway on Saturday, I might, at such short notice, cut through the bureaucracy and just make my own booking. Why was a flight to Brasília, or Kigali, in business class, booked in the way that it was, and who did it?

Right, okay. Let me move on. Another ambiguity that came out in the audit was on the application, or the interpretation, of the £75 gift threshold that had been set. Where have you got to with reviewing that? It seemed to have been applied in such a way that it looked as though people were trying to get around it.

One of the other areas highlighted in the Audit Scotland report, which is also brought out by the Grant Thornton review, is the whole policy on reimbursing people for meals. I do not quite understand some of the terminology around non-city meals, city meals and limits. Ms Quinn, we were told by Mr Brannen at the previous evidence session on the topic that the use of credit cards involves a no-drink policy. However, it is pretty obvious from the findings that have been unearthed by Grant Thornton that, unless people were eating huge amounts of food, a large proportion of those claims—some of them without receipts—were made for alcohol. Can you confirm that first of all?