Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Deputy on his election as Vice Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts. I have previously served on that fine body and know that the Deputy will have an interesting day on Friday. I have read the same documentation he has read on a certain organisation. It is very disturbing and disgusting in parts.

I have received a breakdown of the funding received by the 40 section 38 agencies from the HSE. I will supply this information to the Deputy in tabular format. It would not be possible to read all of it the House. The total funding for these agencies was €2.735 billion in 2013, €2.747 billion in 2014 and €2.883 billion in 2015. As I said to Deputy John Browne, the annual grants provided for these agencies range from €2.05 million in the case of the Daughters of Charity to €356.87 million in the case of St. James's Hospital.

Under its establishing legislation, the HSE is responsible for financial and performance oversight of agencies funded under sections 38 and 39 of the Health Act 2004. The HSE has a formal national governance framework within which such funding relationships are managed. As part of this governance framework, the HSE requires all grant-aided non-statutory agencies to submit their annual audited accounts to it. Furthermore, as part of its annual audit plans, the internal audit division of the HSE conducts audits of a number of agencies each year. Several audits are in progress. The documentation the Deputy was reading before he came into the Chamber, which has been referred to in the media, was the subject of an internal HSE audit. Such audits generally focus on the systems of internal controls operated by the funded agencies and compliance with the HSE service level agreement.

In addition, a number of internal audits have been conducted of the HSE’s own management processes and controls in the funding and monitoring of services provided by the non-statutory agencies. When these internal audit reports are fully concluded, they are sent to the Comptroller and Auditor General and routinely issued under freedom of information legislation. I want to look at publishing all of them, as the Deputy has called on me to do. However, I do not want to bring about an inadvertent delay in finalising an audit as a result of requiring it to be published automatically. I want to work with the Deputy and his colleagues to try to get this done. As I outlined to Deputy John Browne and as the Tánaiste outlined, it is not good enough merely to have an internal look at this matter. We also need to have an external look at it in order that we can ascertain how many lessons have been learned and how many recommendations have been made. That is why we have brought in external consultants.

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