David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

At our last meeting, I asked the Comptroller and Auditor General to respond to claims that the university or people in it may have misled his office. He said at the time he was doing his own report. Obviously, we must come back to it at some point because we have dealt with it in the past. We have the internal audit report which makes 42 recommendations. The correspondence states 17 of the recommendations have been implemented and 25 are in progress. It also states significant changes have been made to senior management structures. Any time there is a report where issues arise in a public institute I ask the same question, which is who is held to account. In this instance I do not know who is held to account. It seems there is some restructuring going on, but if individuals misled the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General or if there were errors, procedural lapses, process failures or whatever by individuals, who is held to account in the university? It does not seem on the face of it that anybody was, except there was a consolidation of positions.

In any event we have these 42 recommendations, and I am just looking for guidance on how we deal with it. Perhaps this will depend on when the special report of the Comptroller and Auditor General concludes. Is this the basis on which we will bring in the Accounting Officer? Should we do it before that? I do not know. We have this internal audit review which is being implemented as we speak. We will have the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, I imagine, sometime in the summer or perhaps before it.