Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Absolutely.

The next item on the agenda is reports and financial statements received since the last meeting. We have three reports before us today, the first of which is the accounts of the Marine Casualty Investigation Board for 2016. This is a small operation with a clear audited opinion. The other report is the 2015-2016 accounts for Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, which have a clear audited opinion and attention is drawn to recognition of the deferred pension funding and a standard for all universities and colleges.

The committee has received the financial statement for 2016 from the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB. This organisation maintains the register of tenancies and provides dispute resolution services for tenants and landlords. The turnover of the organisation is €10.2 million. It is clear audited report but the Comptroller and Auditor General has drawn attention to €2.1 million of legal fees where the relevant services had not been procured by way of competitive processes since 2011. Before I came to the committee today I had a quick look at the accounts for the RTB. The expenditure of the year 2016 was €10.3 million and the single biggest cost was legal and professional fees of €2.147 million. The salary costs were only €1.5 million. That an organisation can spend 20% of its total income in one heading without going to a competitive tender, for the last seven years, is utterly unacceptable. The committee will write to the RTB for a detailed note. We will ask for a detailed note, company by company, to provide the total payments that were made in the financial statements of 2016, legal firm by legal firm as the case may be, or the other professional advisers. I am sure we could include valuers also. We will ask why there was not a competitive tendering process in recent times. When we get this information, the committee will scrutinise it further. The scale of this non-procurement relative to the size of the organisation is extraordinary.