Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

As I have said to the committee on previous occasions, we are responsible for the audit of five of the section 38 entities. We carry out that audit and one of the issues we will look at concerning the section 38 entities is the approval of pay levels for senior managers. There was an occasion when a section 38 entity came to our attention. It was in the course of the 2007 audit of St. Luke's Hospital. Our general concern would be that if an additional payment is being made, it should have ministerial sanction. We do not determine that the amount is not payable. We would recommend to the agency that if it cannot produce a sanction to us, then it must seek a sanction for it and act accordingly. As regards St. Luke's Hospital in 2007, we picked up on that. We wrote to the St. Luke's management and asked them to pursue it with the Minister. We checked the following year that that had been done, but there was no reply on file at that stage. A reply came and we saw that the following year. It indicated that sanction would not be forthcoming for that particular payment. We then wrote to the Department of Finance at the time drawing its attention to it. There was a concern that somebody had full-time employment but there was either a secondary appointment or they were essentially being paid a top-up. We got a reply from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, which coincided with a lot of work beginning on that around 2011.

More generally, within the section 38 entities we audit, as I indicated at the last meeting, we have issued audit queries concerning three of five audits for 2012. I will say one thing, which is slightly different. In most of the cases, where significant payments are being made, we have identified that payments are being made by another body rather than by another public sector body. In the case of St. James's Hospital, payments are being made by Trinity for another set of activities by the individuals concerned. That also happens in another hospital. In Beaumont Hospital there are small payments. Depending on how this plays out and the answers that we get from the hospitals, I may report further on that.