Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

As Senator Browne indicated, it is the practice to call the Accounting Officer before the relevant committee, not the Minister. In the administration of any Department an Accounting Officer can disagree with a Minister and can refuse to sanction a payment which the Minister requests. That is the nature of the safeguard inserted in our public accounting system so that a Minister of the day can request a particular payment be made or sanction be sought for particular expenditure. The Accounting Officer can simply refuse this and tell the Minister that he or she is accountable to the Committee of Public Accounts in regard to a matter and cannot sanction the expenditure. This is a well established feature of our constitutional system.

The amendment tabled by Senator O'Meara raises the interesting question of the new position of the chief executive as an Accounting Officer. The point is that the health service executive will now have its own Vote in the Estimates volume. The accountability structure for a body with its own Vote is already set out in other legislation beginning with the Comptroller and Auditor General Acts 1866-1998, the annual Appropriation Acts and the rules and procedures of the Committee of Public Accounts.

Section 20 makes the chief executive officer the Accounting Officer for the appropriation accounts for the purposes of the Comptroller and Auditor General legislation. The chief executive officer is, therefore, required to appear before the Committee of Public Accounts in his or her role as Accounting Officer. The title "Accounting Officer" is defined in the Comptroller and Auditor General Act 1993 as the officer referred to in the 1866 legislation to whom the duty of preparing the appropriation accounts of a Department is assigned. Appropriation accounts are accounts for the money voted by the Dáil for the supply of services.

The role of the Accounting Officer is central to the system of accountability for public money. It is part of a long established system dating back to reforms introduced in the United Kingdom in the 19th century. It is designed to ensure an open and transparent system for scrutinising the manner in which funds are used, having regard to the principles of regularity and propriety and, in more recent times, the criterion of value for money.

The key element in the accountability framework is the Committee of Public Accounts. This committee undertakes the scrutiny of public funds and reports to Dáil Éireann. This scrutiny by the committee is based on audits and examinations carried out by the Comptroller and Auditor General. The Accounting Officer is personally responsible for the regularity and propriety of the transactions in the accounts for which he or she is answerable, the control of the assets held by the Department or, in this case, the executive, the economy and efficiency in the use of the resources and the systems, practices and procedures used to evaluate the effectiveness of its operations.

The concentration of responsibility in one individual differs from arrangements in the private commercial sector where responsibility normally rests with the board. The Accounting Officer system is unusual in that while being accountable as Secretary General to the Minister for managing his or her Department and for other duties, the Accounting Officer is personally answerable to the Committee of Public Accounts in regard to regularity, propriety and value for money. The Accounting Officer appears before that committee in his or her own right, not as the representative of the Minister.

In the case of the health service executive, the relationship between a Secretary General and Minister would be replicated by the relationship between a chief executive officer and the board of the executive. While the board can instruct the chief executive officer as to what to do in regard to particular matters of policy, with regard to regularity of financial matters the chief executive officer will have a unique statutory responsibility which will be supervised by the Committee of Public Accounts.