Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

I thank the Chairman and committee members. I am attending today at the request of the committee to discuss timing in respect to the presentation of the National Training Fund, NTF, accounts.

The NTF was established by the National Training Fund Act 2000 as a dedicated fund to support the training of those in employment and those seeking employment and to provide for the funding of research to provide information on existing and likely future skills requirements of the economy. It has been the responsibility of the Department of Education and Skills since May 2010.

I want to highlight at the outset that the Department is acutely conscious of the importance of meeting statutory and other deadlines for presentation of accounts. The Comptroller and Auditor General has raised concerns in this regard in his special reports on financial reporting in the public sector, and I know, as the Chairman has indicated, that this is an issue on which the committee has put considerable emphasis.

Informed by the views of the committee and Comptroller and Auditor General during the past year the Department has prioritised this issue, and has worked with bodies across the education sector to strengthen compliance, particularly where statutory deadlines are in place. Considerable progress has been made across the Department’s aegis bodies and in the ETB and higher education sectors. I appreciate that this progress has been acknowledged by the committee.

In this context, it is important to say that the Department did not regard the NTF accounts as being comprehended by the committee’s correspondence of 20 December 2017 which concerned “the failure of public bodies to meet obligations, statutory or otherwise, in relation to the timely presentation of annual financial statements”. We did not take the view that we were failing to meet any defined obligations in respect of the NTF.

As acknowledged in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s special report number 95 on Financial Reporting in the Public Sector, no specific deadlines are in place in respect of certain departmental funds. This includes the National Training Fund, NTF.

The NTF accounts are prepared in line with the terms of the National Training Fund Act 2000, and specifically section 2(14) which states, among other things, that “Accounts of the Fund shall be prepared on an annual basis, in such form and in such manner as the Minister for Finance may direct”. Neither the National Training Fund Act, nor any other legislation, provides for a statutory deadline for production, signature or certification of the NTF accounts. As regards non-statutory obligations, there are no circulars, codes of practice or other guidance which set out a specific deadline for production of the NTF accounts.

In practice, given the imperative of meeting the statutory deadline for production of the Appropriation Accounts by 31 March, it has been the longstanding position that production of the Department’s Appropriation Accounts and engagement with the Comptroller and Auditor General audit of the Vote are given priority in the first part of the year.

Since the establishment of the National Training Fund in 2000, finalisation of its accounts has, without exception, always taken place subsequent to the submission of the Appropriation Accounts. Most recently, I signed the 2017 accounts on 15 May and they were conveyed to the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General on the same day. This long-standing position has not been flagged as an issue of concern by the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General in NTF management letters of recent years, nor has it been listed as a discussion item in recent post-audit engagements between the Department and the auditors. Therefore, I am satisfied that the Department has met its obligations to date in respect of the fund. However, I can also appreciate that, from the committee’s perspective in looking across the entire public sector, it is desirable to have a greater level of consistency in meeting deadlines for the submission of accounts. To that end, I have set a specific deadline for the submission of the NTF accounts to the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of 31 March following the year of account.