We reviewed the Civil Division's response to the draft report and modified the report where warranted. However, we would like to comment on some issues raised by the Civil Division as noted in the paragraphs below.

In its response to the draft report, the Civil Division indicated that the actual number of claims filed as of June 16, 2003, differed from the number of claims identified in the draft report. In the interest of presenting current conditions of the Fund, we obtained updated figures from the Civil Division following issuance of the draft report, and those statistics were used to prepare the final report. Wherever these statistics appear in the final report, we emphasize that these figures are unaudited.

The Civil Division also indicated that the Special Master is now estimating that the number of personal injury claims could be between 2,500 and 3,000. At the time of our fieldwork, this estimate was 300 claims. In order to determine if budgeted funds would be sufficient to pay all claims, we used the highest estimate of 3,000 personal injury claims paid from the Fund.