Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 5 July 2018

Public Accounts Committee

2017 Financial Statements of the HSE
2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 38 - Department of Health

9:00 am

Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

We know that we have over €2.2 billion of our non-pay spend which is procurable, in other words, it should be going through a procurement process. We know we have contracts with a nominal value of €1.1 billion, which is much higher than we had two years ago. We know we have done €460 million in framework agreements, which are not the same as contracts but similar. We know that we have €1.56 billion coverage in terms of contracts being sourced. The issue then is compliance with those contracts. What percentage of the actual expenditure, now that the contracts are in place, is being used against those contracts? We do not have a single system that allows us to have one report on that. What we are doing is that we have a compliance approval programme and we are going around, area by area, determining or estimating a level of non-compliance, and then digging into that and assessing what contracts are there locally that we can make compliant and register nationally, what contracts we need to move away from, and what items we need to put on the sourcing plan to put contracts in place. Typically, that is showing good progress. That is the second of our three-year plans. That one finishes in 2020. It is a significant volume of work. If we had a single financial system - again we are working on this - we would be much more easily able to simply run off a report. Given the scale of our operations, we simply cannot do that. That is the reality.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.