Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yes. We will do work on non-procurement and the design of contracts. I acknowledge that the board has given a detailed breakdown of how the figure of €2 million was arrived at. That is a substantial amount and the biggest item is bus hire. A comprehensive breakdown has been provided. As with Tusla, I thank CETB for that. Having the information is the first step in correcting the problem. We will note and publish the correspondence and come back to this issue. We will include all of the correspondence on non-procurement as part of our dossier when we have the meeting.

No. 2469 is correspondence from Dr. Orlaigh Quinn, Secretary General, Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation, dated 16 October, providing information on the delay in the laying of the accounts of Science Foundation Ireland. The issue was an administrative oversight. The accounts were audited and approved by the Cabinet and we picked up that there was an oversight. We will note and publish that.

No. 2472 is correspondence from Ms Leonora Harty, system governance, Higher Education Authority, providing information on the employee assistance helplines in higher education institutes. We will note and publish that. The note states that the helplines deal primarily with queries regarding individual and workplace well-being services they provide and not so much with broader governance issues. If members wish to discuss this in greater detail, we can do so.

We will note and publish that in the meantime.

No. 2471 is from the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland, SBCI. We have a similar letter, No. 2498, which is almost a similar document. There is a different date on it. It is not on the schedule. We wrote to the SBCI concerning the statement in its accounts of the number of employees assisted by the loans it has extended. We said that was not a real figure. The SBCI actually gave us a figure of total employment in organisations to which it advanced some portion of a loan. This letter states that the average loan is approximately €49,000, which is quite small. It has already extended €1.24 billion in loans. It includes great information, including a county-by-county breakdown of the number of loans and their value for each year from 2015 to 2019. It is very good information in which members might be interested.

The SBCI accepts that all it knows is the number of employees in organisations that have been assisted: "As this is the only data we collect pertaining to employment, we are unable to fulfil directly the committee's request for a breakdown of the number of jobs supported by the SBCI, as distinct from the number of jobs in companies which receive funding or support from SBCI." The correspondence goes on to state: "We will keep our data-gathering under review to ensure that we can continue to provide the Committee with high-quality information that can assist in its review of the SBCl."

The correspondence answers our questions. The SBCI now acknowledges that the figures submitted were overall totals. It does not have a mechanism to produce more granular data. It would be better not to put these inflated public relations-friendly figures in the accounts to give the impression that the SBCI is helping thousands of people when it has no information at all on the actual number of people assisted by the loans it has granted.

No. 2498 is a slight correction of No. 2471. They are essentially the same. I have outlined the essence of the letter. We have made our point. We will take the same query up with Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland. If one added up all the jobs these bodies claim to assist, triple-counting would imply there were about 3 million people in the workforce.