Arts Council writes off €110k over ‘missing’ works

The Arts Council has had to write off an estimated €110,000 in assets because some artworks have gone missing.

The Arts Council Annual Report 2016, which has been laid before the Oireachtas, admits that “weaknesses in control over the art collection”, first highlighted in an internal audit in December 2013, were reaffirmed last year during a process involving a physical inventory and using a professional valuer to procure an open market valuation for a substantial proportion of the art collection.

“Both exercises identified that a number of pieces of art cannot now be physically located and the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that this may have been the case going back many years,” states the report’s financial statements section.

As a result, an adjustment has been made to the opening valuation for the art works for this loss “at the attributed value for the relevant items in the last professional valuation, undertaken in 2014 on a desk top basis”, amounting to about €110,000.

“In the event that these items could be physically located as of the date of the valuation undertaken in April 2017, the attributed valuation would be approximately €42,000.”

The figures confirm an asset write-off last year of €110,000, although it is understood the Arts Council values the missing artworks, thought to be mostly prints unattributed since the 1980s, at closer to €42,000.

A spokesman confirmed these have now been formally de-accessioned or permanently removed from the collection, while the updated valuation of the artworks owned by the Arts Council was €2,516,000 as of the end of last year.

It’s not the first case of missing artworks — in 2015 the Comptroller and Auditor General identified 173 items as missing from the State’s art collection, including 44 from the Houses of the Oireachtas.