Managers who waste money ‘should face PAC’

ENVIRONMENT Minister John Gormley wants local authority managers who squander public money to be hauled before the Public Accounts Committee.

He said managers were given control over substantial budgets without having to be answerable for the decisions they made.

And it was senior civil servants in the Department of the Environment who ultimately had to face inquisition in the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), he said.

An audit his department commissioned into infrastructure spending by local authorities recently found almost a third of projects were over budget.

Two-thirds did not follow the Department of Finance’s basic spending rules.

Mr Gormley said the audit was of “great concern” to him and a gap had developed between those who spent the money and the people expected to be accountable.

“Very often the managers take decisions and in my view are not accountable for those major financial decisions. And the person that takes the rap, and has to go before the PAC, is the secretary-general of my department.

“I think it makes sense... [that] in the context of reviewing local Government structures the real possibility that managers will go before the PAC and account for the financial decisions that they have made,” he said.

Currently council managers are buffered from PAC appearances.

Mr Gormley was in the Dáil to answer questions on an independent Ernst and Young audit carried out on €330 million worth of public money spent by local authorities between 2006 and 2007.

This involved spot-checks of housing, water, waste, parks and community building projects.

The audit, which was first revealed by the Irish Examiner, looked at 6.4% of a €5 billion capital spend.

Labour Party environment spokesman Ciarán Lynch quizzed the minister on the total cost of budget breaches across all sectors.

He said he was concerned the lax oversight identified by Ernst and Young had allowed local authorities to get away with excessive spending.

He said there were a number of outstanding questions on whether the department was monitoring how the money it sanctioned was spent.

“This was a recipe for disaster. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy that these projects were actually going to overrun.

“Who ultimately sanctioned the budget overspends, as outlined in the report? Did the additional permission for this come from [Mr Gormley’s] department or did the overspend happen by the local authority and did they then come looking for the money?

“Surely this issue had been flagged at an earlier date and it shouldn’t have required a report to bring this to our attention,” he said.

Mr Lynch also asked if bonuses had been paid to local managers, despite breaching spending rules.

Mr Gormley said he would provide a report on this because he shared the concerns as the country “had lost the run of itself” in relation to bonuses during the boom years.