CIT building was over budget and 16 months late

A COLLEGE building project went over budget by almost half and took almost twice as long as expected, a Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) probe has found.

The public funding watchdog audited the overrun on the administration building and student centre at Cork Institute of Technology, which were due to take 18 months to complete and cost €13.7 million. Instead, the project took 34 months up to completion and has so far cost €19.9m.

The delay factors included a need to divert live power cables and a water main for the project at CIT’s main campus in Bishopstown, changes to the foundation after variations in rock levels beneath the foundations were discovered, and the contractor’s difficulty finding suitably experienced bricklayers. Disputes arose over the delay costs and more than €900,000 of the €6.1m overrun was attributed to the cost of a conciliation process, although legal costs of up to €5.5m were avoided by not going to arbitration.

The contractor was the lowest-ranked of 10 bidders at the pre-qualifying stage of tendering and concerns had been raised about his price being 10% under the next lowest, but the concerns were addressed before the contract was awarded.

The Department of Education told the C&AG, John Buckley, that CIT had used common practice in its tendering procedure and the various delay and cost factors could not have been predicted.

Another C&AG audit published yesterday revealed that additional pension benefits with an actuarial value of around €800,000 granted to four staff who took early retirement from the Further Education & Training Awards Council (FETAC) did not have the required approval of FETAC’s council or the minister for education. The Department of Education has told the C&AG that the legal position of the scheme and the possibility of recovery or reassessment of unsanctioned benefits is being clarified.

Mr Buckley’s report pointed out that there were gross savings of €1.6m from the early retirements. But, he said, specific approval should be sought when a considerable proportion of such a saving is applied to enhance retirement benefits.

The report also showed that more than one-third of absences of more than 20 days by students were reported by schools, as required by law, to the National Educational Welfare Board in the 2008/2009 school year. But the NEWB is unable to respond to all students for whom intervention is required, the report said.

“Information derived from periodic reporting is inadequate to focus NEWB activity because that reporting is neither comprehensive nor validated. A planned move to prioritisation based on real-time referrals should help to address the effective identification of ‘at-risk’ pupils,” it said.