Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 19 April 2018

Public Accounts Committee

Chapter 1 - Exchequer Financial Outturn for 2016
Chapter 2 - Government Debt
Chapter 24 - Irish Fiscal Advisory Council

9:00 am

Photo of Marc MacSharryMarc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

We do not have this. We just have a situation whereby the Minister has powers to issue directions. However, we established the last day that no such directions have been issued, and Mr. Carville suggested I was stretching it to conclude this did not mean there were any queries on fees or numbers of hours. One of my key questions the last day was if the Department is being billed for three accountants doing repetitive relatively menial work, who is saying that only a junior is needed to do this or are there people saying this? Mr. Carville said he could not answer that because it was very specific to the case. It is obviously a huge concern that we have a level of expertise. This is not to impugn the qualifications or efforts of anybody in the Department, but the fear here is there might be a level of autopilot. Liquidators pay themselves in the normal way, through recoveries and sales, and this is retrospectively approved by the Department or the Minister. With such huge amounts of money at stake this is the concern.