Watchdog facilitated cover-up, claims official
In an explosive letter to the Public Accounts Committee, Terry Corcoran said senior management at Fás had made every effort to block an internal investigation into the Corporate Affairs division.
He said almost all the concerns raised in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (C&AG) most recent report on Fás arose from the corporate affairs division.
However, Mr Corcoran said the C&AG was aware of the work of an internal audit into these matters since February 2007 but allowed senior managers to delay its release and to wrongly blame his division.
“The C&AG’s account [of the audit] obscures the main governance issue that arose, the response of senior management to the internal audit’s conduct during the investigation and whether this amounted to interference.
“Also by failing to identify where the responsibility lay for particular delays, it lends credence to the false impression given at time by senior management that internal audit was slow to conduct the investigation,” he said.
Mr Corcoran said there were legal concerns about the circulation of the audit but these were resolved in July 2006.
And after this, management at Fás prioritised the public relations impact of the audit when it tried to fight its finalisation.
“From this point on [once legal clearance was given] objections to proceeding with the report as it stood were based on consideration of possible damage to the image of Fás.”
After this, the then-director general of Fás, Rody Molloy, prevented the report being dealt with as he wanted the more contentious issues siphoned into a separate audit, he said.
Mr Corcoran said this was out of concern that criminal activities within the organisation should be kept apart from procedural problems. Mr Corcoran had argued the audit report had to be read as one document and the Comptroller and Auditor General& should have drawn attention to it.
“What is left out of the C&AG’s account of these events is remarkable. The facts are that a properly constituted audit committee, a statutory sub-committee of the board of a non-commercial state body with an annual budget of almost €1 billion, was faced with a refusal by the chief executive to respond to a major investigation report,” he said.
Mr Corcoran was moved from his post in March 2007 and moved to employment services’ division.
