HSE ‘had no control’ over €60m fund

AN internal audit of the controversial €60 million SKILL training fund has found that the HSE, which should have been administering it, effectively had no control as money was wasted and corporate governance was breached.

This Thursday, the HSE, the Department of Health and the Department of Finance will appear before the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee to explain what committee chairman Bernard Allen has already acknowledged is a series of “frightening shortcuts in procedures” and “a total breakdown in governance”.

Money was pumped into the fund by the Department of Health and then the HSE between 2002 and 2009.

The HSE internal audit report completed in June and seen by the Irish Examiner focuses on the years between 2005 and 2009 when the HSE was charged with making payments to the fund. It shows once the money was received by the steering group of the SKILL project, the departments had little control over it.

“Overall, this lack of transparency and clarity resulted in the creation of a silo whereby the SKILL programme with a five-year budget of €60m and €12m [per annum] thereafter, and although part of the HSE’s Corporate National HR Directorate, in effect did not report to that directorate,” the authors of the internal report said.

Relatives of the members of the steering group were given jobs without the roles being put out to tender.

One temporary employee was given a private pension without any authorisation.

Over five years, employer contributions of €62,155 were paid into the fund while the employee made contributions of €14,624. And in order to compensate the employee for their contribution they were raised up the salary scale.

Furthermore upon retirement, the worker was given a HSE pension of €3,834 per annum. Much of the report focuses on €2.5m paid into a SIPTU-named account, the SIPTU National Health and Local Authority Levy, an account the union has said it was unaware of. It found €348,000 was unvouched and overall public funds totalling €2.353m have not been satisfactorily documented and accounted for by the union. It found SKILL’s operators had no records for 31 foreign trips.

The audit found travel expenditure was processed outside the SKILL books of accounts as a SIPTU employee arranged and paid for overseas travel for public and other officials then recouped the un-vouched, unspecified costs from SKILL or funded it from the Department of Health’s annual grant.

In fact, a number of invoices addressed to the SKILL office and approved for payment by SKILL management came into the possession of the union’s official who paid the invoices on behalf of SKILL and then sought reimbursement from SKILL as part of an unitemised invoice.

“The effect of passing invoices, which had been properly addressed to SKILL, to Union-A’s employee in order to process payments outside the SKILL books of account, resulted in proper procurement processes not being undertaken, withholding tax not being deducted on consultancy payments, tax clearance requirements not being adhered to, and could be construed as a deliberate attempt to distort the analysis, and hence transparency, of SKILL expenditure,” it said.

SIPTU, which has insisted it never received the SKILL monies, is investigating the SIPTU National Health and Local Authority Levy.