Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is from Paul Quinn, chief procurement officer in the Office of Government Procurement. This came into effect on 18 April. Essentially, the document says that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, DPER, has published guidance for assisting public service bodies in the performance of their functions under the Act. It summarises the key features and states that all public service bodies have the responsibility to have procedures in place and available to their employees for dealing with protected disclosures. It goes on to address the nature of my query. As we know, a lot of this has been outsourced to other organisations and we asked what the procedure was and whether everybody goes and does their own outsourcing. The Office of Government Procurement says it has a procurement framework which came into effect on 11 April this year, only the other day. That is now being sent to all Government bodies in respect of outsourcing of these issues.

There are three framework agreements that can be put in place. If the witnesses have not read the guidelines yet, they are on their way to them now. They should have read them last week. One framework agreement says that for the provision of third-party confidential recipient services pursuant to section 6 of the Protected Disclosures Act, an organisation that might not be big enough to have somebody independent internally can designate a third-party confidential recipient and there is a framework in place in respect of the procurement of that particular service.

There is a separate service that is provided for under this framework to say that an organisation can have a procurement service in respect of the full investigative services into an alleged wrongdoing purported to be disclosed under the Protected Disclosures Act including a review of such services. That allows an organisation to have a person not just act as a confidential recipient but also investigate the alleged wrongdoing independent of the organisation.

The third framework procurement contract that is now in place is for full investigative services of allegations of penalisation or adverse treatment as a result of having made a disclosure of wrongdoing, or where such a disclosure is purported to have been made, pursuant to the Act, and for review of such investigations. In the event that somebody feels they have been penalised as a result of making a disclosure or a purported disclosure - I stress that there is a presumption in the Act that a disclosure is a protected disclosure - this allows for a framework to be put in place and independently procured in line with Government procurement.

There are three separate contracts now available and that is part of the issue we have been processing here. We felt the thing was not working and were putting the onus on DPER. It is up to the Department at national level to get this protected disclosures legislation working across the board. We found on several occasions - I have two or three more examples on my desk - that the current arrangements have not been working. This framework is an acknowledgement that the system was not fully functional up to now. This letter was dated 11 May. It came to the committee within the last week and is due to be raised in correspondence.