Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

The value of contracts declared in 2017 which we regarded as non-compliant was €5.9 million. I am just giving that bit of perspective. That was from procurement of approximately €100 million. Within the Department, we have established a central procurement unit and a network of procurement liaison officers in every division. We have trained those procurement officers in proper procedures. The value of those non-compliant contracts has diminished. I will return to the Deputy with a figure shortly.

We had 38 contracts valued at €5.6 million in 2017 and the reasons for those fell outside the exceptions provided in the procurement rules. While this is not in any way to excuse this, I assume that the people who involved themselves in those procurements felt that they complied with the exceptions provided for in the circular. That should not happen. We now have a system of assessment by a senior officer before any procurement exception is allowed and it is also assessed by the central procurement unit. The objective of that system is to eliminate non-compliance altogether and we are confident that we are well on the way to doing that.

Of those 38 contracts, 20 with a value of €1.71 million related to separate contracts that were aggregated. It is possible that different people contracted with the same party and were dealt with separately. For the purposes of our return, we felt for the sake of transparency and propriety that they should be aggregated and returned as a single batch. A substantial part of that non-compliance involved separate contracts with the same vendor. We do not permit that to happen any more. Eight of the contracts with a value of €1.8 million were contracts rolled over beyond a reasonable time period. In other words, they were existing contracts for some services and instead of running a new procurement, they were rolled over.