My Department is prioritising maintaining a practice of more timely payments, including providing more resources to address any issues. Any delays in making payments are deeply regretted and my Department is according this issue very high priority.
I am advised that my officials are engaging positively with the provider and on the successful conclusion of this engagement it is expected that a payment will issue shortly thereafter.
The delay in payment was due to the large volume of invoices being received by my Department. Additional resources have been assigned within my Department, in addition to outsourcing of some tasks to accelerate processing. The volume of payments issuing is steadily growing. My Department will continue to press on to eliminate the backlog while ensuring appropriate governance is in place to safeguard the proper spending of Exchequer funding.