Colleges that make unauthorised payments to staff or make misleading or false financial reports could be hit with financial penalties from the end of this year, the Government has decided.

Radical reforms of how third-level colleges share public investment will have little effect unless the Government decides soon how to deal with a funding crisis in the sector, the experts who designed the reforms have warned.

IT’S probably expecting too much of the banks’ public interest directors to be thorns in the side of the culture that blithely stumped up the €1.5 million pension top-up for Bank of Ireland boss Richie Boucher.