Ms Maria Browne:

I thank the committee for the invitation to attend to assist the committee with its examination of the office's 2017 audited appropriation account, which was published by the Comptroller and Auditor General in September 2017. I am joined by my colleagues, Mr. Owen Wilson, assistant chief State solicitor, and Mr. Michael Fallon, head of corporate services. I am pleased to be in a position to say that my office does not feature in the annual report of the Comptroller and Auditor General for 2017. As requested, I have provided the committee with details of expenditure in 2017 and an update on expenditure in 2018.

As members will have seen from the briefing material, my office deals with a very wide range of legal work on behalf of the State. The office is a constituent part of the Office of the Attorney General and the legal services we provide range from litigation, to commercial, to advisory, to property and other transactional services. The office has five legal divisions, each headed by an assistant chief State solicitor and organised by area of law, and a corporate services division. Legal divisions are further organised into sections dealing with specific types of legal matters. The corporate services division provides organisational and management services which support the legal work of the office. The two main areas of spend for my office in 2017 were payroll and counsel fees.

Within the administration subheads, payroll is by far the largest expenditure at €15.7 million in 2017. This equates to 47.4% of the entire expenditure from the Vote for 2017. The authorised staffing number for 2019 is 275 and we are in the process of filling a number of vacancies. The ability to recruit in a timely manner and retain specialist staff, both legal and administrative, is an ongoing challenge. Expenditure on the remaining administrative subheads, such as staff training and development, library and information services, knowledge management, utilities, building maintenance, photocopying and document preparation, telephone and postal services, and ICT facilities, amounted to €2.6 million or 7.8% of total expenditure in 2017.

The provision of legal services is spread across five legal divisions, each headed by an assistant chief State solicitor, which is equivalent to assistant secretary. These divisions are the administrative law division; the advisory, commercial and employment law division; the constitutional and State litigation division; the justice division; and the State property division.

With regard to challenges, we are a demand-led office and there is a direct and pronounced correlation between our clients' issues and the services we provide to them. Aside from our transactional work, by and large it is difficult to forecast with any degree of certainty the exact scale and extent of litigation which may be taken against the State in any given year.

Some of the work can arise at very short notice and outside of normal office hours. Specialist work requires the ongoing development and maintenance of the appropriate expertise, and the ability to respond to new developments in the law is a continuing requirement.

Expenditure on legal services includes counsel fees, general law expenses and external legal services, and accounted for 44.8% of overall expenditure in 2017. The main area of expenditure under this heading is on fees paid to counsel, which in 2017 accounted for 41% of the entire expenditure of the office.

The bulk of the expenditure on counsel fees is, to a large extent, dependent on the level of activity in the courts at any given time and so is always difficult to forecast accurately. Recent years have seen an increase in the level of complexity of the work being handled by the office in areas such as judicial review, immigration and asylum law, environmental law, and commercial and EU litigation, and this has resulted in increased spend on counsel, including senior counsel. The management of expenditure on counsel fees is a key activity for my office, and there are significant controls in place to manage this expenditure.

In terms of oversight and risk, as my colleague mentioned, the office maintains an audit committee jointly with the Office of the Attorney General. The committee includes three external representatives, all of whom, including the chair, are from the private sector. It has been in place for a number of years and meets regularly. Internal audit services are tendered externally and our current auditors were engaged following a joint Attorney General's office-Chief State Solicitor's office, AGO-CSSO, competitive tendering process in 2017.

The office maintains a risk register which is reviewed every six months. Progress is monitored by the office's management board, together with a number of joint AGO-CSSO committees, including the risk management committee and the audit committee.

I will do my best to assist the committee in its consideration of the 2017 account for my office. In the event that I do not have the information available to me here today, I will do my best to provide any outstanding material within two weeks.