Bobby Aylward (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have been contacted by a trusted constituent who is a bookkeeper and accountant and has been the treasurer on his local school's board of management for 12 years. The board has always been fully compliant with PAYE and VAT to ensure value for money while keeping costs for parents to a minimum so that children's education costs are as low as possible. However, by its own admission there is one area where the board has not been fully compliant as it does not fully conform to all provisions of the Act referenced in my question.

The reason for this is simple. The school receives around €6,000 in capitation fees. Over the years, the treasurer of this school has made inquiries as to the cost of certification or audit costs. The lowest quote the treasurer could find for certification of the accounts was €350, while audits were in the region of €1,000. This treasurer maintains that spending money on something that is quite simply a box-ticking exercise that produces nothing tangible while running the school on a shoestring budget is a waste of valuable resources. Moreover, getting the accounts audited would require an outlay of 20% of the annual school funding on the audit itself. With these administrative costs, are we placing an undue financial burden on small schools operating on small budgets? I appreciate the need for oversight but there must be some sort of middle ground.

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