The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General tends to be read as an inventory of civil servants' mistakes. Yet, as the C & AG notes, the cases highlighted "should be viewed in the context of the many services provided by the departments which are well managed and controlled".
Indeed, the measured tones of Mr John Purcell are in contrast to the enthusiasm with which the Committee of Public Accounts grills public servants who come before it to explain the irregular and the merely inefficient.
Mr Purcell's plea for perspective is well illustrated by the Department of Social Community and Family Affairs.
The welfare budget provides an annual headline on the issue of fraud, which duly accounts for an estimated £12.09 million in the latest yearly review. Yet even allowing for the fact that this is only the fraud the department knows about (or suspects), viewed against the gargantuan annual payout on insurance and assistance schemes - £4.7 billion last year - the figure of £12 million is not large.
It can be contrasted with the whopping £63 million in DIRT payments recouped from the financial institutions or, indeed, the £19 million recovered as a result of inquiries into the National Irish Bank's offshore investment scheme.
In fact, the report dwells longer on monies not yet recovered by Revenue. It notes, on the plus side, that the amount of outstanding taxes continues to fall (to just over £1 billion at the end of May 2000) and, on the minus, that the number of audits carried out has also been falling.
The DIRT and other inquiries are one of the factors blamed for this reduction, necessitating as they did the transfer of audit staff from routine duties.
However, the report is more critical of the Revenue's Special Enquiry Branch (SEB), formed 21 years ago to tackle the black economy before its scope broadened.
Specifically, the Comptroller speaks of reduced levels of activity (the inquiries are again a factor here), of a failure "to extract maximum benefit from the information received" and of poor co-ordination with other parts of Revenue.
His report's chapter on the Garda Siochana is dominated by the PULSE computer system. Designed to replace the force's badly-outdated network, PULSE experienced a big increase in estimated cost, from £36.5 million to £55.6 million, even before it began.
Rather than breach the budget approved by Government, the project organisers opted to reduce the scope of the system; separating the work into two phases, the second deferred to whenever additional funding become available. Yet, as the C & AG notes, the scaling down "raises questions as to whether what is being delivered is what the Government had effectively approved".
One of the main problems with PULSE was that it envisaged 60 per cent of the man-hours required being provided by the force itself. The report notes, however, that the recruitment of the necessary IT staff was made difficult both by the reluctance of the Department of Finance to sanction it and by the buoyancy of the IT market.
The C & AG acknowledges the complexity of the problem and accepts that such computer projects cannot be fully designed at the planning stage. However, he notes that it is "a matter of concern that the main contract required such significant change in scope over its lifetime".
While the Garda struggles with new technology, the Defence Forces get a telling off for overvaluing stocks which are either surplus or obsolete.
Examples include a £100,000 collection of spare parts for Land-Rovers, some of them 20 years old and all of them now redundant since Land-Rovers have been replaced by Nissan vehicles.
A quantity of old uniforms was not quite obsolete, the C & AG heard, since it could be given to the FCA. However, there appeared to be no use for "substantial quantities of barbed wire," with a notional value of £60,000.
One of the longest sections of the document concerns a faulty photographic scanner, bought for £500,000 by the Office of the Paymaster General (PMG), and the cause of consternation ever since.
The scanner almost caused a computer virus to infect all Government Departments, missed a £7,000 addition to a cheque, and in general performed so poorly it often took the PMG up to 15 days to process cheques and notify banks which ones it was approving while the banks were clearing them in two days.