Chairman:

Is that agreed? Agreed.

No. 2705B has been flagged by Deputies Munster and Carthy. It is from Mr. Ray Mitchell, assistant national director of the HSE, dated 10 January, providing a brief note requested by the committee in relation to non-compliant procurements. Myself and the two Deputies have flagged this because it is of serious concern. Deputy Carthy has suggested that the committee requests further information as to why the HSE is unable to furnish this information and why the timeline for correcting this is so extensive. Four years is excessive to try to correct a serious matter like this. From my point of view, the correspondence from the HSE is wholly unsatisfactory. The HSE does not have a single procurement system. It operates several legacy systems, it is unable to provide full visibility on how procurement is done and, over a four-year period, there were examples given by the Comptroller and Auditor General of up to 49% non-compliance with procurement. This body will spend a €17.4 billion budget this year and the extra spending put in for Covid. We are talking about huge sums of money and the really concerning thing is that the HSE says it cannot correct this until quarter 1 of 2024, which is four years from the date of this letter. What it says is that the HSE has a plan to have 80% value of the HSE health spend covered by a single national finance and procurement system by 2024. I suggest that it is totally unacceptable to the committee, and that it would be totally unacceptable to the general public, that public funds cannot be accounted for more efficiently.