Victor Boyhan (Independent)
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I thank the Vice Chairman and members present for facilitating me. I have to go up to the Seanad Chamber after this but I will be back. I welcome Ms Larkin and Mr. Murphy and thank them for their ongoing positive engagement with me. They are always available and if I have a particular query I have always found them to be very receptive and helpful in furnishing me with any details to assist me in my own parliamentary work.

The overview of the work of the Local Government Audit Service is very extensive. Ms Larkin in her final paragraph referred to the more granular detail that is in the individual reports themselves. I want to flag a few concerns. I refer to the time lag from 2020 to 2022. I know that is not Ms Larkin's problem but it is the constraints of the system. Does she have any recommendation or suggestion as to how we could knock a few months off that?

I took the time to contact many of the 31 local authorities to see how they have dealt with this report. I am a former councillor myself so I know how it works. The local government audit report is furnished to the chief executive. It then finds its way to the audit committee, which is quite a select group itself. As we discussed earlier, the chairs of those committees are not elected members, who are precluded under the legislation from chairing an audit committee. I have a difficulty with that as do some elected members but that is the system we have to operate in. Then we have a situation where the audit committee might not meet for another two or three months. It is a crazy situation. Therefore the chief executive will say he or she has not discussed it with the audit committee and cannot bring it to the attention of the elected members. I do not understand the logic of that. I want some reassurance if the witnesses can provide it. Is there some impediment as to why all members of the council could not receive the report at the same time? The audit committee cannot adjust, tweak or modify any element of the report or tamper with it, not that they would. There is no reason the audit committee and elected members could not have it at the same time. Can Ms Larkin confirm that?

The 2020 report sets out the LGAS priorities for 2022. I am not going to read them out here but they are very impressive. I like that. While we are dealing retrospectively with so much, the LGAS has gone to the trouble to set out in page 10 its priorities for 2022. I acknowledge the importance of that contribution.

On the recurring themes, I took a random sample of 12 councils. I am not going to name them because it would be unfair to single them out. They know who they are. I printed each one off and marked them up. I refer to one local authority in respect of the fixed asset register. The witnesses will be very familiar with this; it is the land and property register. Again, the auditor singles out that it has been reported by a previous auditor and that it is recurring. It is stated that the LGAS has asked the council to address these issues continuously since January 2017, when we had the corporate state report, I think it was report No. 30, an excellent report which I suggest now needs to be revisited. The chief executive in this case says the matter is noted and it is a work in progress. That is after years and years during which the same local authority is being cautioned about its failure to comply. Are there sanctions?

We go to another authority. It is a recurring issue for ten or 15 or them and I have not even looked at the whole 31 councils. A recurring theme is the failure of local authorities to have a detailed inventory of valuable real estate that belongs to the taxpayer. It does not give me confidence in chief executives managing the real estate of the citizens in these 31 local authority areas. I am not going to rehash the RTÉ programme or bad publicity but it does not give the public confidence in a system when the local authorities are not addressing issues the Local Government Audit Service has raised.

The final area I want to single out is that of local authority companies. I received a letter from a councillor who lists in an Excel sheet all the non-commercial agencies under the aegis of the local authorities. We have all these subsidiary companies which are hands-off for the local authority members and are subject to no scrutiny or accountability by the elected members of the councils.

Many of these companies involve theatre, culture and sport. They could be development companies or property companies. They are investing millions of euro of taxpayers' money and taking risks and not all of them have been very successful. Somehow, none of this is in the public domain. These are public funds and these are people are non-elected officials in local councils buying property and dealing in real estate and yet there is no accountability to elected members. There may be an elected member or two on the board but their duty of care is to the company, not the council, so I have real concerns.

They are two recurring themes. This might be beyond my remit but I ask that we produce a special report on these subsidiary companies, audit them and find out what is going on in the 31 local authorities because I do not think it is satisfactory that elected members have no way of scrutinising the public affairs and funds relating to them.

As Ms Larkin knows the two points I am making about the real estate property register, she might address them. In simple terms, I am asking whether it is possible to have a renewed focus on these two key issues that the auditors continually raise across many local authorities.