Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Mr Ó Foghlú is indicating that we can expect to wait three years from the end of the relevant financial year for the accounts to be published. As Accounting Officer, he must accept that is utterly unacceptable. This is all public money. We issued a special report in July 2017 specifically dealing with this issue and I am sure the Secretary General accepted the correctness of those recommendations. Waterford Institute of Technology has previously appeared before the committee on this issue. Here we go again. The last time it appeared, we threatened to send its representatives home because their accounts were two or three years out of date. We are back here two years later in exactly the same scenario.

Mr. Ó Foghlú stated it will take three months for the Department to publish the accounts. If I or a departmental official with a finance brief got those accounts, they could be gone through in a morning. I presume Mr. Ó Foghlú has tasked such officials to go through the accounts. Legally, the Department has three months to go through the accounts but it could do so in three hours if it so chose. The Department has the financial statements from each of the institutions for a certain period but it is not willing to publish them. Does the Department have a query regarding the audit of the Comptroller and Auditor General? I ask Mr. Ó Foghlú to explain this to the public. I do not understand the reason for the delay.