Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 20 June 2019

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of Seán FlemingSeán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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There is good stuff there. We are doing our work. It is good to have the interaction. It is regularly pointed out that a legislative issue is the cause of what we have uncovered. It is up to members to deal with that.

I now want to move on to the rest of the correspondence as quickly as possible. Some of it is relevant to this issue. One of the reasons I want to mention some of it is that issues raised within it are mentioned in some of this morning's newspapers. As Chairman, letters went out in my name to quite a few public bodies whose accounts were not submitted to the Comptroller and Auditor General by the end of March. We would like to see accounts within three months of the end of the year in the interests of good financial governance. We waited until the end of April to send these letters, thereby giving the bodies a bit of leeway. There are 18 bodies on the list and we have received replies from 13 so far. I will mention them briefly.

No. 2202B is correspondence from Water Safety Ireland in which it states it submitted its accounts by 30 May. We will ask the Comptroller and Auditor General to give us a report on the small number of bodies which have still not submitted their accounts at next week's meeting. By then it will be almost the end of June. We will ask for an update next week.