This isn’t about fraud.

27th October, 2009

I received the huge report on I Eireann procurement practices at 11. I had a chance to read a lot of it before our committee meeting. This is a report about procurement and specifically the (near) complete lack of processes in place to govern the spending of tax payer’s money. What I Eireann attempted to do today (and I fear some of the coverage has fallen for this) is to portray this as a fraud story.

 

It isn’t. As scary as the numbers around fraud are, the report points out that there were very weak controls on the spending of 50 to 70 million euro per annum, and that the risk due to lack of controls was between 7.5 and 10%. That’s between 5 and 7 million of waste per year. This was the point I put to Dr Lynch and his colleagues in the committee today.

 

Just unbelievable. In a previous life I spent a lot of time auditing or getting audited. I have never, but never read anything as bad as this. The report said today that the risk to I Eireann was ‘super critical’.

 

And, where oh where, is the Minister in all of this? More to come on all of this.