Shatter and gardaí fail to detect the truth
The penalty points controversy hasn’t gone away, you know.
This week’s publication of the Comptroller & Auditor General’s report into the fixed change notice system of penalty points raises serious issues of credibility for both the gardaí and Justice Minister Alan Shatter.
To a large extent, the C&AG’s report vindicates the whistleblowers who raised the issue of a culture of abuse in the penalty points system.
Last May, the Department of Justice published a report into allegations some gardaí had abused the system by terminating points willy nilly. Two whistleblowers in the force had alleged that penalty points were quashed in numerous cases. The main allegations concerned gardaí acting on behalf of friends and relatives, and on the flimsiest of basis.
Once the allegations were aired in the Dáil, Shatter ordered an internal Garda investigation. This was conducted by assistant commissioner John O’Mahoney, whose report was published on May 15.
It rubbished any suggestion of corruption or illegality, neither of which were at the heart of the complaints. (The corruption being alleged did not involve money for favours, but merely favours for friends.) The report also suggested that, apart from a few stray senior officers, the termination of penalty points was largely down to “administrative dysfunctions”, as described by Shatter.
The C&AG’s report paints a very different picture. Far from being a “comprehensive inquiry”, the O’Mahoney investigation appears to have missed a number of key issues that point to a systemic problem in deleting penalty points for choice offenders.
Both reports record that around 5% of fixed charge notices, representing an average of around 10,700 cases each year, are terminated. Both worked off samples of the full volume.
O’Mahoney found there were three possible departures from administrative procedural guidelines in respect of terminations conducted by three of the 113 inspectors or superintendents who came within the scope of the allegations.
This inferred a minor problem involving a minority of senior officers. The biggest issue in this small problem was senior officers terminating points outside their districts.
The C&AG sampled eight districts and found that terminated notices involving cases from outside each district varied from 18% to over half of all cases. This suggests a problem that is far from small.
The whistleblowers had cited as a major concern repeat offenders having notices terminated. O’Mahoney didn’t see this as either a significant issue or noteworthy of specific investigation. The C&AG did. He found in his sample that “2,900 cases were terminated in relation to around 700 vehicles with three or more cases terminated each”. Getting nabbed for one notice is unfortunate. Being nabbed for three suggests a trend, but managing to have them all quashed must be a blessing.
The system allows for an offender to apply for a termination in special circumstances, such as responding to a medical emergency. Supporting documentation — such as a doctor’s note — is required in such a petition. Otherwise, a petitioner could just be chancing his or her arm.
O’Mahoney didn’t have much to say on the lack of documents supporting petitions. The C&AG noted that a quarter of all terminations at district level had no supporting documentation. And in 60% of those that did, the document consisted of “a letter of petition from the vehicle driver, without any third party corroborating evidence to support assertions made in the petition”. In other words, the motorist could, in these cases, be opting for “the dog ate my homework” defence.
No record was kept of the petitions that were rejected, which may explain some of the ludicrous reasons for petitioning for a termination:
* “Hurrying back to a farm as bees were attacking livestock”
* “Being late for a religious ceremony”
* “Being late for a swimming lesson”
* “Being on urgent domestic business”.
If these were the reasons accepted, how bad must have been any that were rejected? “Please officer, I was just on my way to Mars.”
None of this was highlighted as an issue by O’Mahoney. There was nothing about records gone missing or destroyed. The C&AG reported that the force has a “Notepad and Tracking Allocation System” to record the issuing of fixed charge notices. Each notepad has 20 forms, which must be accounted for, even if an entry is spoilt.
The comptroller found that nearly 18,900 forms (7.4% of the total issued) were unaccounted for. There are some administrative reasons why this may be so in a very small number of cases, but certainly not for the volume recorded.
Overall, O’Mahoney spotted “departures from administrative guidelines”. The C&AG found that “because of significant weaknesses in aspects of the operation of the fixed charge notice system, a substantial proportion of offenders — up to one in five — are able to avoid penalties, and do not end up in court”.
THERE is a gulf in the findings, and the culture highlighted, between the two reports. Yet back in May, Shatter was emphatic in defending the O’Mahoney report.
“I don’t think there has ever been such a comprehensive inquiry conducted so rapidly into such an issue,” he said. “Each and every allegation has been comprehensively investigated. There were three volumes of appendices which took me six hours to read.”
Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan was equally emphatic: “I am very, very satisfied that assistant commissioner O’Mahoney and his team would leave no stone unturned at digging out issues around criminality or beyond if they found that.”
The allegations had contained precious little in the way of criminality, but instead on abuse of the system.
How could Shatter claim that O’Mahoney was an unprecedented “comprehensive inquiry” when the C&AG report exposes its obvious shortcomings? How could a bunch of accountants detect so much more than a team of cops trained in detection?
Shatter’s cabinet colleague, Transport Minister Leo Varadkar, met with one of the whistleblowers and found him to be “very credible”.
Three weeks after the O’Mahoney report was published, Varadkar told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland: “Reading through the report, particularly reading the appendices and the different cases, I have to say that I got the sense not so much that they had looked at the underbelly of this but that, in a lot of cases, they were explaining away penalty point terminations that to the reasonable person seemed a little bit unusual.”
That’s a far cry from Shatter’s ringing endorsement. Where one minister sees much that is wrong, another appears to want to look away.
The C&AG investigated the whole penalty points scandal on foot of an approach from one of the whistleblowers. Obviously, the comptroller found the allegations credible, and his hunch was backed up once the investigation was conducted. It is now obvious that if the issue had been left exclusively in the hands of the justice minister then the O’Mahoney report would be the final word on the whole affair.
Now, at least, the full story may get a proper airing. Yesterday, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, John McGuinness, said the controversy could re-emerge in the coming weeks when the commissioner appears before the committee.
“This is all system failure but within that somebody has to take charge… and nobody seems to be taking charge. They are all nameless individuals and it is only the accounting officer and the minister that can answer these questions. But I think that somebody has to step up to the plate and admit that somebody was wrong.”
History would suggest that Mr McGuinness may be a long time waiting. But at least now we have the result of an independent inquiry into the penalty points fiasco, and the results are not comforting for either Alan Shatter or Martin Callinan.
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