Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The difficulty is that we are dealing with what is, essentially, a State-funded body, namely, RTÉ, and the Department of Social Protection, but the committee does not have a good overview of the final implications of the practices of misclassification of the workforce in RTÉ. We know a substantial payment has been made to Revenue and that there will be claims from individuals involved, albeit RTÉ has not confirmed it will resolve those issues. We know the Department is carrying out this work. The point I am making is that this is different from other cases. It is not the same as the Department carrying out an examination of a private individual, or even a private company, because at the end of the day it is essentially the public who will be expected to meet whatever the shortfall is. My concern is the timeframe that is given at the end. There is reference to completion of the investigation later this year or early in 2023. I fear we are into how long is a piece of string territory there. In general, when we get vague timeframes such as that, it means these things roll on even longer. I propose the committee write again to the Department. We can take it from this letter that it will not give us quarterly updates on the investigation. We should ask it to provide us with the step-by-step process of the investigation or what elements the investigation will take up and a likely timeframe for each stage of the investigation so that we can have a sense of when the work will be completed and will be able to adjudicate at various points whether it is on track to meet the target date.