Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 28 April 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 24 - Justice
Vote 21 - Prisons

9:30 am

Mr. Doncha O'Sullivan:

Where you get into areas of non-compliance in terms of things that are about, say, procurement and so on, then clearly corrective action needs to be taken in that space. However, more generally, what you have is an iterative process, and this is something the Policing Authority would speak to as well, where you are working through the issue and asking the organisation to go back and review what it is doing to try to reach the target or maybe identify why the target has not been met and what are the factors. Usually there are a lot of external factors that would impact on levels of activity so there is kind of an iterative process rather than a command and control one. At the end of the day, the Commissioner remains accountable and responsible for the performance reports and we work through the issues with them as they arise.