RTÉ boss refutes 'bogus employer' charge

RTÉ director general Dee Forbes told the Public Accounts Committee that three things needed to happen in order to make RTÉ viable: “Public funding needs to be rectified, our costs need to reduce, and our commercial revenue needs to stabilise”. Picture: Maxwell Photography

RTÉ has denied that it has routinely retained contractors as bogus self-employed workers, but admitted that it has made an ‘initial payment’ to Revenue on foot of an audit.

“First of all, we’re not a bogus employer, RTÉ has a number of relationships with its staff,” the broadcaster’s director general, Dee Forbes, told the Public Accounts Committee.

The committee heard that the Revenue audit in question began on foot of a report commissioned by the broadcaster from consultants Eversheds Sutherland in 2018 to review the status of its workers’ employment.

While that audit is still ongoing, a preliminary payment had been made by RTÉ to the Revenue, although the figure in question was not revealed.

Bogus self-employment sees people who are, to all intents and purposes, fully employed by a private entity denied the statutory social insurance contributions that PAYE workers receive.

The issue is also costly to the exchequer, with the Revenue missing out on PRSI contributions from those employers, to the tune of “conservatively” €1bn per year, according to bogus self-employment activist Martin McMahon.

The RTÉ Eversheds Sutherland report had seen 157 contractors at the broadcaster identified as having “attributes akin to employment”.

Of that cohort, 82 were eventually offered contracts, while 79 accepted them. The other three employees are no longer with RTÉ, the committee heard.

The meeting likewise heard that none of the contractors in question was ever consulted directly, but rather the views of their managers at the broadcaster were sought.

In terms of retrospective payments to those workers who had been misclassified, RTÉ’s head of human resources, Eimear Cusack, said that a decision on back payments cannot be made until the Revenue audit, and a second review process of the broadcaster’s employment standards by the Department of Social Protection, is completed.

A consistent theme of the hearing was the financial plight of the broadcaster, with Ms Forbes claiming that RTÉ does not currently have “adequate revenues” to deliver against its public service remit.

She stated further that “persistent” Government failures have led to lost jobs in the broadcast sector.

Ms Forbes said that while RTÉ will post a surplus for 2020, that is only possible because many of the broadcasters’ costs have been deferred “2020 was a very unreal year. Those costs will come back in,” she said.

She said that three things needed to happen in order to make RTÉ viable: “Public funding needs to be rectified, our costs need to reduce, and our commercial revenue needs to stabilise”.

In terms of public funding, the director general poured focus on the licence fee, stating that RTÉ is losing €50m each year due to TV licence evasion and the increase in ineligible homes due to streaming content.

The TV licence is considered by many to be obsolete in an era of dominant streaming services which do not rely on traditional broadcast transmissions.

Ms Forbes said that a new broadcasting licence should be a “universal fee”, to which all households “contribute and benefit”.

“Over a quarter of households now don’t pay at all,” Ms Forbes said, adding that the television licence funding format is “by some distance the most unreformed part of the public media in Ireland”.