SIPTU gets access to report into controversial training fund

AFTER months of waiting, SIPTU has finally received access to an accountancy report on the account at the centre of the controversial HSE SKILL training fund.

Over the coming days, a subcommittee is to study the report carried out by Grant Thornton on the SIPTU national health and local authority levy fund.

Issues with that account — the signatories to which were SIPTU official Matt Merrigan and union member Jack Kelly — first became public at the start of the summer as part of an investigation into the HSE’s SKILL training fund.

A considerable part of the €4.48m lodged in the fund had come from SKILL, and the HSE probe found serious breaches in the way the training fund was governed, as well as a lack of receipts for much of the money paid out. In subsequent months, details emerged of further payments into the account, including €924,000 from the Health Service National Partnership Forum.

SIPTU has consistently said that even though two of its officials were the signatories to the account, it did not have knowledge of it.

The report completed by Grant Thornton — at a cost rumoured to be €70,000 — was commissioned by Mr Merrigan and Mr Kelly.

It is understood that SIPTU has funded the cost of it in order to be able to access it and use the information contained in it along with the information it has compiled itself through an investigation of the account.

Once the SIPTU subcommittee has studied the Grant Thornton report, it will complete its own report along with two trustees the union has appointed to take control of the account.

That report will be presented by the trustees to SIPTU’s executive at a meeting on February 9.

SIPTU has been under pressure from the Public Accounts Committee which is probing the HSE training fund, to complete its own report before February 15.

The union is hoping that, if its trustees’ report is acceptable to the executive it will be able to present its contents to the committee before that deadline.