Q&A: What's in the Mazars report into RTÉ and what does it mean?

the Mazars report noted that it could find no rationale for why it was decided to use a barter account from 2012 onwards. Picture: RTÉ.ie

Q: Remind me what the barter account is again?

A: A barter account is a means of a company haggling for business without a straight-up cash invoice being the bottom line. That account is generally run by a third party agency (in this case, three agencies based in the UK). In RTÉ’s case the barter account appeared to make sense for the broadcaster by allowing it to compete for advertising business it might not otherwise have been able to.

Q: And what was this report?

A: The Mazars report was one of roughly six commissioned (in this case by media Minister Catherine Martin) in the wake of the Ryan Tubridy payments scandal, which first emerged in late June. Mazars was charged with finding financial transactions which wouldn’t have appeared anywhere on the books. Today's interim report (yep, there are more to come) was predominantly dedicated to the by-now notorious barter account. There were many issues with that barter account which led to the review, but some of the main ones were:

• No one on RTÉ’s board (with the logical exception of Dee Forbes) seemed to even know it existed. 
• The €150,000 paid to Ryan Tubridy in 2022 as part of the notorious deal with Renault was processed via the account, with no names attached to the invoices.
• It seemed to have been used fairly arbitrarily to cover some pretty frivolous client entertainment expenses over the years, in particular the account with the Astus agency in the UK. 

By definition, those were expenses that very few people therefore knew about. They were also the last thing the account should have been used for.

What was in the report?

A: Loads. 

• The report says that the accounts with the barter agencies were unsigned. 
• RTÉ wasn’t following its own rules in terms of how much of each advertising transaction was non-cash. 
• There was no formal policy for purchases from the barter accounts (which is perhaps unsurprising given the type of client entertainment expenses it was used to run up). 
• The transactions were not stored in a professional manner. 
• And there wasn’t even a list of qualified personnel authorised to use the barter account to pay for something. Which meant that in theory anyone could have.

So has RTÉ done anything wrong?

A: Mazars hasn’t gone that far as the terms of reference wouldn’t let it. However, it does note that it could find no rationale for why it was decided to use a barter account from 2012 onwards. But it’s hard to see how the secretive nature of the client entertainment expenses and the Tubridy payments would pass any sort of probity test.

What does it mean going forward?

A: RTÉ’s commercial division may be quite stymied by having the barter way of doing things taken away from it. That could mean less commercial revenue for an already cash-strapped institution. Hubris seems to have been a major factor for the way the barter account was used. Someone should have shouted 'stop' regarding the client entertainment expenditure. Instead it all came tumbling out and now the very viability of RTÉ as a going concern is at stake.