RTÉ sold €6.3m of advertising through barter account in return for only €3.1m in cash — report

RTÉ Director General Kevin Bakhurst and RTÉ Chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh following a meeting with Communications Minister Catherine Martin today. The report said that it had 'not identified any benefit to RTÉ' in its usage of the barter account. Photo: Gareth Chaney/ Collins Photos

RTÉ sold advertising via its controversial barter account worth just under €6.3m between 2017 and 2022, but received just €3.1m in cash in return for that business, a new report has revealed.

The barter account which RTÉ used routinely for entertaining staff and clients, meanwhile, was operated on a no-signature basis, according to the new report into the RTÉ payments scandal.

The contracts for the three UK-based barter agencies RTÉ used prior to 2021, and which were given to investigative accountants Mazars, went unsigned.

A barter account is a means of booking goods and services on a partly non-cash basis in order to secure business from agencies on a negotiated, discounted basis. They are routinely used in the advertising industry.

The barter account came to public prominence when it emerged that RTÉ had routed €150,000 in payments to Ryan Tubridy through the barter account, with no names being attached to the invoices, facts which have led to accusations that the payments were always intended to be hidden.

Mazars said it was not in a position to evaluate the rights or wrongs of the commercial decision which RTÉ took in 2012 to use a barter account to access wider advertising markets. However, it said that it had “not identified any benefit to RTÉ” in its usage of the barter account.

The company said that though RTÉ had told them it applies a split of 50-50 to each transaction, there were “instances where this ration was not applied”, and for which they had not been provided with a formal approval process for the discrepancy.

Mazars added that due to the off-balance-sheet nature of the barter account, 50% of its business would never have been reported in RTÉ’s official accounts, with that money eventually accounted for via year-end adjustments to the broadcaster’s accounts from 2019 onwards.

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It said that RTÉ “does not appear to have a formally approved policy” for making purchases through barter media agencies, and that those purchases were not subject to the same approval requirements that general purchases were.

Likewise, cumulative barter purchases were not tracked, and there was no defined approved list of RTÉ staff who could make a barter transaction happen.

Meanwhile, while RTÉ maintained its own record of barter account transactions, it was not stored in an easily accessible manner, and Mazars had been required to search in detail over 1,400 emails to identify “whether such evidence exists”.

The barter account became a source of much embarrassment to RTÉ following a series of Oireachtas hearings into the Tubridy payments in July, which revealed that the account had been used for the purchase of exclusive sports and concert tickets, expensive restaurant meals, and sundry miscellaneous items, including thousands of flip flops for a corporate party.