HSE spent €382m outside procurement rules since 2020

At Wexford General Hospital, some €40,000 was spent on milk, fruit, and vegetables in 2022.

The HSE spent €382m in procurement without a formal competition in just three years, including €24.2m in phone company bills in 2022 alone.

The executive, which is currently experiencing a crippling funding crisis causing an indefinite recruitment freeze, spent €111.6m in 2020, €143.9m in 2021, and €128.5m on such expenditure.

The HSE has been bedevilled by non-compliant procurement for many years, with the body struggling to maintain oversight of what health funding is actually spent on given the disparate nature and sheer number of organisations and institutions it funds.

Under public procurement rules, all contracts incurred by State bodies valued at greater than €25,000 must be secured via competitive tender.

New breakdowns of non-compliant procurement, released to the Irish Examiner under freedom of information, show that in 2022 the HSE paid €11.7m to Eir, €10.8m to Vodafone, and €1.7m to Three for the provision of communications services, from mobile phone bills to land lines to internet data packages.

Eir received for nearly 5,800 of the 9,600 total payments made in 2022.

A further €17m was paid to PFH Technology Group, a Cork-based ICT contractor, in 2022 for the provision of ‘external ICT support’ and other related contracts, grouped under the banner ‘ehealth and disruptive technology’.

By contrast, PFH was paid just €92,000 by the HSE in 2021, a year in which the health service was laid low by a massive cyber attack, when the HSE was harshly criticised for the paucity and outdated nature of its IT defences.

The released data shows that the HSE spent some €26.7m on non-contract agency staff — typically used in situations where no in-house staff are available and paid at higher rates — across 2022, with the vast majority of those payments allocated to nursing staff and care assistants.

Of that figure, €10.6m was paid to CPL Healthcare, a division of the CPL recruitment agency, for contract tracing for covid-19.

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Cork/Kerry healthcare contributed just €2.8m to the total expenditure, the vast majority of it to Eircom, with €51,000 spent on postage from CHO4 the other standout description from the region.

A further €1.8m was spent on drugs from pharmacies, the majority of that expenditure incurred by two hospitals — Cavan Monaghan General and Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown in west Dublin.

The HSE in Carlow/Tipperary/Kilkenny spent €283,000 on interpreter services marked as being for ‘social inclusion’, while University Hospital Limerick paid €52,400 to Mayo-based company Beaumont Private Ambulance for services across the 12-month period.

Some €722,000 was spent on document archival and storage with two separate companies, with a further €199,000 spent on furniture supplies in Laois/Offaly, Westmeath, and Galway.

The sheer granularity of the information released is exemplified by two returns from Wexford General Hospital, which spent some €40,000 on milk, fruit, and vegetables in 2022.

Meanwhile, at least €628,000 was spent on the purchase of vehicles worth in excess of €7,000, all without a formal tender.

The HSE had not responded to a request for comment regarding the nature and extent of its non-compliant expenditure at the time of publication.

Last month the Irish Examiner revealed that the HSE’s planned new catch-all financial reporting system will be delayed by at least a further three years into 2028.

The integrated financial management system will not be delivered in full until the end of July 2028, with the initial budget of €82m also likely to be exceeded, the HSE said at the time.