Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 20 December 2012

Public Accounts Committee

2011 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 19 - Official Development Assistance
Vote 28 - Foreign Affairs and Trade
Vote 29 - International Co-operation

11:20 am

Photo of Simon HarrisSimon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My understanding is that the term "unqualified" implies a clean bill of health, while the term "qualified" means there is a question mark. One also has the interesting category of "other". We do not need to concern ourselves with the 55% of audit opinions that are unqualified. A further 7% are qualified and we will discuss those in a moment. The category of "other" is interesting and includes instances where the relevant national audit office expressed a qualified audit opinion in relation to at least one department or ministry but it was not possible to precisely quantify the amount of Irish Aid grant affected and instances where audit reports did not contain clear audit opinions. Ireland was pooling money with other countries and it appears no one can ascertain how much of this pooled money, which may have been misappropriated or may not have been tracked, was provided by us and how much was provided by someone else. I ask Mr. Rogers or Mr. Cooney to comment on this issue. The figure of 38% for the "other" category is high. When one adds the 7% in the "qualified" category, one finds that 45% of Irish aid has a question mark over it. How do we get to the bottom of this?

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