A senior public official told MLAs that he did not consider there had been an £8.5m overspend on a consultancy contract for a civil service accounting system, on 8 February 2012. Members of the public accounts committee wanted to know why the cost of the contract for the Account NI project rose from £970,000 to £9.7m. Stephen Peover, the permanent secretary of the Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP), told members that the nature of the project had changed over time. It became a different beast. It was an elephant rather than a horse," he explained. An audit office report recommended that "in order to demonstrate value for money" DFP should have undertaken separate procurement exercises for each of a series of contract extensions. The report said that the contract had overrun in terms of cost and time "particularly given that the scope of the project remained unchanged throughout." "If we were doing this again we wouldn't do it this way," Mr Peover said. He said the department did not regard the process as having overrun. Sinn Fein's Mitchel McLaughlin was not impressed. "If it walks like an overrun, and it quacks like one, it's an overrun as far as the public are concerned," he commented. John Dallat of the SDLP said it seemed that the large consultancy firms had done well out of the government. "Who was in control of this gravy train, you or PriceWaterhouseCooper?" he asked.