Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

With due respect, when we see things being filed late, invariably they are VECs and various different bodies. They have reasonable budgets and I have no doubt the bulk of them have in-house accountants. This is basic corporate governance and meeting deadlines. The worry is the same application of deadlines which are applied by the State to private companies is not being applied in the same measure to public companies which are funded, in many cases, by taxes paid by private concerns. As a committee we have to have consistency. It is incumbent upon us as a committee to find out why this is happened, if it is, as Mr. McCarthy said, a resource issue and whether are there other issues.

We can talk about getting value-for-money and whatever, but in a lot of cases one needs to do the simple things well. One of those is to have proper deadlines, accountability and figures delivered on time so that we are not examining figures which, in some cases, are six and seven years old. As a committee, we have to send the message out that what applies in the private sector must apply in the public sector. If there are issues we need to address to make sure that happens, let us address them. At the moment we are operating in a vacuum. Every week we come in here and invariably see accounts which are one, two or three years old. That is just not good enough.