Agencies’ waste of millions of euro revealed

Government departments and state agencies continue to squander millions in taxpayers’ money through poor judgment, lax monitoring, and crippling inefficiencies, despite the ongoing squeeze on public finances.

The public spending watchdog, Comptroller & Auditor General Seamus McCarthy, found damning evidence of avoidable waste and overspending across the public sector. His annual report highlights how:

* A CSO employee was paid two salaries for six years, despite alerting his employers to the overpayment and trying to have it stopped;

* A builder was awarded €32.6m in the High Court after officials failed to finalise a land swap deal in return for affordable housing;

* Up to one in five road traffic offenders, involved in as many as 170,000 offences, get away without paying the penalties imposed, often without explanation from the authorities;

* The National Gallery spent €420,000 reinstating six security attendants to their jobs a year after making them redundant;

* The Revenue Commissioners are accepting settlements far lower than their estimate of the taxes owed, and are failing to impose penalties and interest, without paperwork to explain their decisions.

It also emerged nearly €100m was spent last year cleaning up toxic and unauthorised waste dumps, more than half of which went towards making a former steel plant in Co Cork safe.

Mr McCarthy made recommendations to various bodies and departments to tighten up their monitoring and quality assurance systems to try to prevent mistakes and overspends.

However, he also took several to task, the HSE in particular, for budget overruns in day-to-day spending, urging it to adopt more sophisticated forecasting models to ensure more accurate predictions of its spend in the year ahead.

“Estimates of voted expenditure presented to Dáil Éireann for approval should reasonably accurately represent the amount that it is expect will be spend on each of the related services,” said Mr McCarthy.

He also said the Department of Foreign Affairs should have been able to uncover sooner the fraudulent use of €4m of Irish aid funding in Uganda.

Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee John McGuinness said the report showed insufficient oversight of the way public money was spent and insufficient emphasis on obtaining value for money.

“What the report is saying is that in a range of areas, the checks and balances are not working well enough.”

He said the PAC would consider the report in detail and demand detailed explanations from the relevant bodies where some of the worst cases of waste were concerned.