Gardaí urged to recover millions owed for policing events

Those recommendations include that any decision to waive or reduce fees be clearly documented; that gardaí seek to produce “more meaningful data” on costs incurred in policing events; and that billing for such events be formalised into recommended procedures.

Gardaí had previously agreed to fully implement all the comptroller and auditor general’s recommendations.

In its pending report, the PAC said An Garda Síochána should provide “a timeline and current progress status” for the recovery of any outstanding fees within nine months.

The committee also recommended that, going forward, An Garda Síochána reports annually on the costs of policing events, the total income recovered, any outstanding debts, and the force’s effective recovery rate for outstanding fees.

The standard garda rate for policing such events is €45 per hour, though this does not take into account overtime rates. The comptroller and auditor general had recommended that the €45 rate also be kept under constant review.

The new report stems from a meeting of the PAC with An Garda Síochána last summer during which the committee heard that the gardaí were owed €2.6m in unpaid fees for events in which it had provided policing services, a fact which the comptroller and auditor general suggested could equate to “subsidising commercial activity with public funds”.

In his 2024 report, Mr McCarthy had noted that the flat rate system used by An Garda Síochána to charge for policing such events had failed “to reflect the actual cost incurred in many cases”, given overtime and higher-rank pay were not accounted for.

He noted further that, in at least one case, a charge for an event had been waived in its entirety as it had been treated as a “charity event”.

In terms of record-keeping, Mr McCarthy had found that “weaknesses” existed in An Garda Síochána’s record keeping and internal controls, with no reliable audit trail existing for the actual hours worked, overtime, and differential pay, thus making it “impossible to assess whether the fees charged are appropriate or whether the State is covering a shortfall”.

He also reported that all invoice listings for the policing of such events were maintained on a single stand-alone spreadsheet which had never been integrated with the financial accounting records of the force, something he said “carries financial control risks”.

At the PAC hearing on the topic last June, An Garda Síochána’s director of finance, Aonghus O’Connor, said the recovery of unpaid fees had “ramped up” in recent times but €2.6m remained unrecovered for events policed in 2023 and 2024 at that time.

He added that the force has no formal method for penalising agencies or corporates which did not pay their fees on time or at all.