Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Friday, 15 July 2016
Public Accounts Committee
HSE Financial Statement 2015
10:00 am
Mr. Tony O'Brien:
The audit report makes it clear that the person to whom we are referring as the former CEO either could not or would not provide information for the internal audit division in support of the figures he had provided. That is the first fact. The second is that the service provided objectively represents good value for money. I do not mention this as a defence but as a factual statement. We need to see the net balance in the organisation to reach a conclusion on the final question that arises in this context, which is whether any of the money transmitted to Console was diverted for other purposes. These details will flow on foot of yesterday's appointment of a High Court liquidator. One of the challenges identified by the internal audit division was the absolute confluence of the funding. As members will be aware, Console raised a great deal of money from many sources. While we were not in a position to unpick all of it, we were able to identify that there was lots of very strange expenditure. We believe this expenditure was most likely funded from fund-raised money.
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