John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

They are never accepted. There is a huge volume of recommendations made through various reports, that have, by and large, been ignored. I have often asked this committee how many recommendations through all of the reports were made and how many of those were actually accepted. It would be a very worthwhile piece of work to do to find out. It tells you a lot about Departments if you take the time, as I do, to see how it all functions. My interest is not to catch anyone out but to understand why the Committee of Public Accounts is still in business. The overriding desire should be to put it out of business because we have such an efficient operation that very little will happen. I see the waste and very little scrutiny in terms of the public accounts side of the work at local government level. Even though there might be local audit committees, they do not function in the way I would expect them to function from a business perspective. I can name many outstanding pieces of work of complaint that just rest there. There is a resistance either within local government or the broader Civil Service to having one master audit committee that is a Comptroller and Auditor General to deal with local government and with every other aspect of government. There is a resistance to that. I wonder about the resistance to change right across the different Departments. Changes are happening slowly but in terms of the vast amounts of money Departments are now spending, there should be a far greater drive at that level to get the necessary change and to drive it down through the Civil Service structure itself.