Budget overruns - Pathetic excuses for overspend

The opposition have landed some devastating political blows on the Government yesterday over the waste in employing consultants.

This is especially the case in regards to the cost overruns incurred by the Health Service Executive (HSE) in implementing the Payroll, Personnel and Related Services (PPARS) computer system.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern tried to defend the system as necessary in the consolidation of the 11 disparate Health Boards into a single executive. “The new HSE,” he said, “now has a proper system.”

He added that the officials had been trying to do their best but that, “they haven’t done it very well to date. But they should try to get it right and use money correctly”.

The system was originally estimated to cost €8.8 million, but extensive changes were introduced and the whole thing has cost some €150m to date, with a projected final cost of around €166m.

At present it covers only 37,000 of the 136,000 employees it was intended to serve. The Taoiseach admitted there was an over-dependency on outside consultants. He bragged that his own department introduced a computer system at the cost of €5m because it employed its own staff rather than outside experts to implement the project.

This was rather typical of his approach in intimating that others are to blame for bungling.

In fact, the Taoiseach and his Government as a whole are responsible for the outrageous waste of public money.

Some health workers were grossly overpaid under the new system and it was disclosed during the summer that one worker was overpaid by e1m. That man had the honesty to report what others might have considered their good fortune. How many other people remained quiet about excessive payments?

It is suspected that the overpayments ran into millions of euro, but irresponsible extravagance was not confined to the Department of Health and Children.

The cost of outside consultants employed by the Department of Agriculture, for instance, jumped from €4.6m in 2000 to €19.1m in 2002, and the Comptroller and Auditor General exposed the gross extravagance in the purchase of overpriced land for a new prison to replace Mountjoy Jail.

The fact that the Taoiseach could keep the costs down in his own department raises serious questions about his supervision of the Government as a whole. Ultimately he is responsible for the appointment of ministers, and some of his most senior colleagues were in charge of the Department of Health while the fiasco was allowed to develop. Yet nobody is being held accountable.

The current budgetary situation, showing that expected revenue is up by over €1 billion for the first three quarters of this year, should be welcomed, but it is totally unrelated to the squandering of finances elsewhere. In fact, the surplus would be even greater if that money had not been squandered.

Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey adopted a mind-numbing complacency in suggesting that even though every penny of government money should be accounted for, the millions misspent were “relatively very, very small” in the context of overall government spending of €41 billion this year.

This was a pathetic attempt to excuse the inexcusable.