Paddy McHugh (Galway East, Independent)

The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General is a guaranteed source of annual dispute and disagreement between Government and Opposition. An objective analysis of the report would show that the extreme and polarised positions adopted by both Government and Opposition in pursuance of, on the one hand, defence and, on the other hand, criticism are unwarranted. The Minister for Finance was anxious to point out that in 2005, the year to which this report relates, gross expenditure by central Government on public services amounted to approximately €45 billion. Although he did not say it, I presume the reason he offered this information was to stress that when dealing in such a large sum, waste will occur. While I accept that not every system and process can be perfect, I do not accept that there is an acceptable level of waste. The Government and Departments should at all times strive to eliminate waste. There should be an obligation on the relevant Minister to address every instance of waste and show that measures have been put in place to prevent a recurrence.

The Opposition does not do itself justice in this process either. Attempts are continually made to portray the annual report of the Comptroller and Auditor General as some sort of shocking report carried out to expose some new disgraceful wastage. It is nothing of the sort. The Comptroller and Auditor General has a statutory requirement to report annually in his audit of departmental appropriation accounts. One example from this report illustrates the problem we have with big bureaucratic structures within which one person does not know what is the other's role and may even be unsure of his or her own role. The HSE is one such example. The illustration in the report shows that the HSE does not know the number of persons who hold discretionary medical cards, even though it pays GPs supposedly based on the number of medical cardholders in the individual practices. Doctors are paid on the basis of 75,000 cards, while HSE estimates put the number holding cards at 45,000 a difference of 30,000. While the bureaucratic HSE cannot establish the true number, it continues to pay for the 30,000 it believes do not exist.

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