Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 18 November 2021

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 32 - Enterprise, Trade and Employment
Chapter 6 - Covid-19 Restart Grant Schemes

9:30 am

Dr. Orlaigh Quinn:

I agree with the Chair. It was not a situation that I could in any way stand over. As soon as it came to my attention, we paid the bill immediately. We did a review internally. Even after that, I asked our head of internal audit to take it on and to do a separate review of all of our procedures to ensure that this could not happen again. In his report to me and to the management board, he noted that it was an exceptional case and that it was not indicative of any wider problem. However, we did review our compliance across all of our payments. We found that we are pretty much average across other Departments. We only had one late payment, for example, in 2019. The figure in that case was €3,000. We accepted all of the recommendations that the auditor put forward around segregation of duties, financial procedures and records management. We accepted everything in that report.

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