Ken Foxe – Page 51 – TheStory.ie

Reports on internal audit for Garda Commissioner Noirín O’Sullivan

GARDAI have been overpaid by almost €2 million in pay and pensions but the force does not have enough staff assigned to get the money back.

An internal audit report has said that chunks of the money will end up being written off because of difficulties in recovering it.

The report on financial controls, prepared for Garda Commissioner Noirín O’Sullivan and obtained under FOI by Right to Know, also said there were not enough staff to recoup the money.

At one stage, not a single person was responsible for collecting the significant amount of money owed.

Read the documents below.

Release: €65 million in Department of Foreign Affairs spending data

[If you support our work, we recommend €50/year]

This is a datadump of all spending by the Department of Foreign Affairs across a wide range of categories for 2015.

Included is the €46,000-a-month spent on renting a residence for the Ambassador in Tokyo, as well as the €5,400-a-month for a home for our most senior diplomat in the Vatican. Also in there is the €165,000 for an armoured car for our man in Ramallah, and €60,000 for a non-armoured Mercedes Benz for the Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.

It includes €250,000 for furniture removal, and just over €220,000 on business class flights out of a €2million+ bill for airfares. About €180,000 was spent on hotels, with the biggest bill of €5,752 charged to the protocol division by the five-star Glenlo Abbey in Galway for hosting the German President.

Another large cost was “maintenance”, mostly to houses and embassies rented by the department. One contract was just over €210,000. Cars cost more than €750,000, with €69,000 spent in Ethiopia, €64,000 in Mozambique and €37,000 in Uganda — countries in which Irish Aid, the state’s overseas aid agency, is active.

A bill of €475,000 was run up on official entertainment, while a chauffeuring company was paid more than €50,000. Dublin Airport Authority was paid €16,400 for VIP lounges and other services.

Across the network of embassies and consulates, the bill for cable and satellite television came to €72,000 with the highest at Ireland’s UN office and consulates in New York. Cleaning bills for the diplomatic buildings exceeded €1m. The department also paid €186,654 in “settlement costs” to former local staff at the Irish embassy in Lesotho, following its closure in 2014.

Here is the raw data:

Download raw data here.

Continue reading “Release: €65 million in Department of Foreign Affairs spending data”

Gamekeepers turned poachers

Here are some internal Dept of Finance documents on the move of a senior civil servant from the Department of Finance to Bank of Ireland.

Michael Torpey, who was employed on a salary of €200,000-plus annually, was transferred to the NTMA for three months and told not to work in his area of expertise – as part of a ‘cooling off period’.

He was asked not to return to his desk after Christmas because he had agreed to take a job in Bank of Ireland and was instead dispatched to the National Treasury Management Agency where, despite being an expert in banking, he was forbidden from working on any matter relating to it. Mr Torpey had been a key figure in the Department of Finance’s work on the restructuring of banks before being poached by Bank of Ireland late last year. He was due to begin work at the bank this month.

Once he announced his intention to leave his job, the Government insisted on a three-month ‘cooling off period’ funded by the taxpayer, according to documents released under Freedom of Information legislation. Mr Torpey’s move to Bank of Ireland caused concern in the Department of Finance, where there were issues raised over a possible conflict of interest.

Sinn Fein’s Pearse Doherty has raised questions over the move pointing out that Fine Gael had committed itself to a two-year cooling off period for senior civil servants moving to the private sector. He explained: ‘Michael Torpey – and I don’t want to cast aspersions on him personally – as head of state shareholder management unit had very sensitive information on all of the banks and now he has a senior appointment with Bank of Ireland.

“He has information on AIB – they are a direct competitor. And now to take up an executive position in a rival bank leads to all sorts of problems and all sorts of issues.”

The Department of Finance had said Mr Torpey would be subject to the provisions of the Official Secrets Act. But as Doherty said: “There is no “Men in Black” style machine to wipe his memory and say forget everything you knew.”

Elaine Byrne has also been looking at this area and published an interesting report on the increasingly frequent nature of such moves.

Documents obtained:

Who ran up a €1,600 bill ringing a single mobile number in Pakistan from the Oireachtas?

This story is by Ken Foxe and based on a recent story in the Mail on Sunday: Documents obtained under FOI are below.

A politican is suspected to have run up a bill of more than €1,600 calling a single mobile phone number in Pakistan, an unpublished Oireachtas memo has claimed.

Officials in Leinster House’s telecoms unit estimated that calls to a ‘very small number’ of foreign numbers were costing the taxpayer at least €14,000 per year.

Other costs included an estimated €1,249 bill for calling a mobile in Australia, €581 to a mobile in Lithuania, €381 to a Maltese mobile, €370 to a UK mobile, €366 to a South African landline and €331 to a landline in Cyprus. The officials admitted they were powerless to establish whether the expensive calls – made in 2010 – were legitimate as they don’t track who TDs and Senators call on their taxpayer-funded phones.

But the memo stated it was ‘difficult to imagine’ how they could be genuine. ‘It is difficult to imagine what Oireachtas business would give rise to calls costing €1,621 to a single Pakistani mobile phone number, and it would be irresponsible to consider the possibility that such calls might have been an unintended/improper use of the service provided. Without availabe data it is not possible to make any judgement on the matter.’

The discoveries were made after a report was commissioned following the ‘Ring of Kerry’ controversy in which a €2,639 bill was run up dialling a premium phone line to vote for Michael Healy-Rae, who was a contestant in the Celebrities Go Wild TV show.

That led directly to a ban on calls to premium rate numbers from all Oireachtas phones and immediately eliminated any potential for abuse. These unpublished memos, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, were prepared internally but never sent forward for consideration by spending watchdogs.

The Oireachtas has confirmed they are now planning a review of telephone services to look at the risk ‘of inappropriate use, or excessively expensive use of telecoms facilities. However, tackling the problem of politician’s personal phone bills has proven difficult because of the cloak of secrecy that surrounds them.

The Oireachtas operates a screening process for calls and if civil servants, and other similar staff, run up excessive bills – the costs are immediately red-flagged. But this screening does not apply to TDs or Senators, which means inappropriate use of phone facilities can never be investigated.

There is a proviso on the above figures in that they are based on seven months of usage, with a twelve-month figure extrapolated from the January to end July cost.

Original documents:

The mystery of the €95 Oireachtas phone call

(This is a story featured in the Mail On Sunday, by Ken Foxe)

A politician ran up a €95 bill on one single phone call but Oireachtas authorities have no way of tracking down who made it.

The same person is understood to have run up more than €344 in costs on five separate phone calls to Colombia, records from the Oireachtas show and details of which were published in the Irish Mail on Sunday.

The single most expensive call, made in May of this year, to an unidentified number in South America ended up lasting one hour and three minutes. It was made during peak time and charged at a rate of €1.50 per minute with the final bill coming in at precisely €94.79.

The hundred most expensive calls from the Oireachtas have cost the taxpayer in excess of €3,400 since the beginning of 2011.

However, there is no way of checking on the vast majority of these calls and whether they relate to legitimate business or were simply keeping in touch with family members or friends abroad.Phone calls made by TDs and Senators, under law, are not logged for ‘reasons of privacy and confidentiality’ meaning their legitimacy can never be checked.

The costly calls form part of more than €280,000 that will have been spent providing free telephony to politicians and staff during the past two years.

Two of the ten most expensive calls listed on Oireachtas records were made to Colombia with the second costing €86.06. Seven of the most expensive calls were made to Kenya, mostly at peak time, and cost between €61.44 and €79.51, while a further call to Mozambique cost €76.01.

Enormous bills were also run up on calls that seem inexplicably long with a 17 hour phone call listed on January 20. That call, made to an Irish phone number at peak time, ended up costing the taxpayer €36.72 and was attributed to ‘faults in [a] broadcasting line’. Two other marathon phone calls are also listed in the Top 100 with a 14 half hour call costing €31.28 and a 13 hour one costing just under €30.

Here is the data in full: (Download here)

Corrib earthquake documents

A small earthquake off the coast of Co Mayo sparked a flurry of correspondence within the Department of Communications, Energy, and Natural Resources.

Although no damage was caused, the Department sought assurances from Shell that pipelines in the area could withstand a 4.0 quake. The company also carried out an underwater inspection of their assets.

The documents indicate the high levels of sensitivity that still surround the entire Corrib gas project with a memo prepared for Minister Pat Rabbitte to bring to Cabinet.

– Ken Foxe (Mail on Sunday)

The documents can be found here:

Office of President expenditure at Waterford IT

This is a report carried out by Deloitte & Touche into €3.7 million worth of expenditure by the Office of the President of Waterford Institute of Technology. It was released by the Higher Education Authority under Freedom of Information legislation along with the response drafted by the college.

And the response drafted by the university:

Political pensions: The costs

Political pensions and lump sums for former TDs, Ministers and Senators have cost nearly €2 million every single month over the past year and a half.

An estimated €32.7 million has been spent by the Oireachtas and Department of Finance since January 2011 on pensions for former politicians. The cost includes more than €9.5 million paid in lump sums to the record number of public representatives who retired after the last election. A further €1.5 million was paid out in termination lump sums with another €3.24 million given out in ‘termination payments’.

In total, once-off payments came to €14.35 million with a further €12.68 million paid on actual ongoing pension payments. A detailed breakdown of expenditure, which was first obtained by the Irish Mail on Sunday, shows that €371,234 has been paid out by the Oireachtas every single week since January 2011.

Around €5.2 million has been paid out during the same period in Ministerial pensions with a further €515,540 paid out in ‘severance’ payments. When the Department of Finance payments are taken into account, the weekly cost to the taxpayer has been €449,757 over the past seventeen months.

Many familiar names are in receipt of sizeable state pensions including Ivor Callely, Padraig Flynn and Ray Burke.

Expenditure by the Department of Finance on pensions is contained in the following parliamentary question.

This is the FOI request and a breakdown of the figures:

John Perry's enormous mileage claims

Small Business Minister John Perry managed to claim almost €30,000 in mileage expenses in less than 11 months.

The Fine Gael TD even managed to claim for 4,417kms in a month in which only two official appointments are listed in his diary. The Minister had an engagement in Wexford and one in Tuam, which is just a short drive from his home in Ballymote, Co Sligo.

Asked how the mileage was run up in a period in which the Dail and many government offices were closed, his Department said he had taken no holidays that month. They also said much of the mileage had been run up driving between his three constituency offices in Co Sligo.

In July of last year, the Minister made a claim for 8,722kms, which works out at 281kms per day. Mr Perry’s home in Ballymote is 192kms from the Dail, with a driving time of two and a half hours. To put it in perspective, that claim was the equivalent of a round trip to Wexford every single day, including weekends.

In the month of September, the Minister made a claim for 7,588kms despite the fact that at least nine days of the month were spent abroad (in Australia, the UK & Belgium). For the remaining days, his claim works out an average of 344kms per day, the same as a round trip to Belfast every single day, including weekends and the Bank Holiday. This level of mileage would require the Minister to have spent around four hours of each day in his car.

At the most fundamental level, it is very difficult to see how a tax-free sum of €29,782.35 can possibly be required to keep a car on the road for less than a year.

The Department of Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation issued a lengthy statement on the matter to the Irish Mail on Sunday at the weekend:

‘While the Dail was not in session during the whole month of August, Minister Perry continued to carry out his duties and work commitments as an elected representative for his constituency of Sligo/North Leitrim and as Minister for Small Business.

‘Due to work commitments, and to enable the Minister to fulfil his constituency obligations, Minister Perry did not take any holidays during the month of August.

‘In his role as a public representative for the constituency of Sligo / North Leitrim the Minister has three working constituency offices based in Ballymote, Tubbercurry and Sligo. The Minister operates clinics for his constituents in these offices and travels between them very frequently. In his role as Minister for Small Business he has also met with members of the business community from the region at his offices in the Constituency.

‘During the months of July, August and September – just like in every other month since being appointed Minister of State – Minister Perry has covered long distances within his constituency, between his constituency and Dublin, and all around the country in order to balance his duties as Minister of State with representing and meeting his constituents.

‘Details of the Minister’s constituency engagements and his engagements as a member of a political party were not released as part of the Freedom of Information request as these records are exempted from release.

‘It would not be unusual for Minister Perry to drive to and from Dublin, as well as to undertake other trips in the same day.

‘Mileage paid to Ministers of State is strictly based on mileage driven, and odometer readings are provided to the Department at the beginning and end of every month.’

Here are the documents:

Ruairi Quinn expense claims and insufficient transparency

Following on from a series of postings about the mileage expense claims of Ruairi Quinn (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), the blogger Anthony Sheridan [Disclosure: Anthony is the uncle of Gavin, the other half of thestory.ie] made a complaint to the Standards in Public Office Commission seeking an investigation.

They returned to him last week to say that there was ‘no basis on which to pursue the matter’.

What they did say was damning in its own right however, making very clear that the rules for Ministerial mileage were ‘not sufficiently transparent’.

In the case of Mr Quinn, it simply involved stating a monthly mileage total and cashing the resultant cheque. There were no further inquiries, no petrol receipts, no odometer readings or anything of that nature sought to back up the claims. As later was discovered, the reason for the high claims stemmed largely from his travel to and from his holiday home in Roundstone, Co Galway, something the Education Minister was curiously reluctant to admit when interviewed on RTE and Newstalk.

The Standards Commission have now written to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to ask that the rules on this type of claim be changed. They have suggested that detailed claims for each and every journey – as applies to every other public servant in the country – should have to be made by Ministers.

Two observations from all this. Why is it that the systems governing expense claims by politicians are always so vague? The cynic might suggest having no rules is useful because how can you break a rule that does not exist. It is hard not to be cynical.

Credit where credit is due to the Standards Commission, as they have put Minister Brendan Howlin under intense pressure to make the change and force the country’s most senior politicians to declare their mileage journey by journey, as always should have been the case.

The letter from SIPO to Mr Sheridan follows in full:

Dear Mr. Sheridan,

I refer to your complaint of 27 February 2012 under section 22 of the Ethics in Public Office Act 1995 and section 4 of the Standards in Public Office Act 2001 in relation to recent newspaper articles concerning claims by Mr. Ruairi Quinn TD, Minister for Education and Skills for traveling expenses in July and August 2011.

The Standards Commission has considered the complaint in light of the contents of letters and enclosures from Minister Quinn and from Mr. Sean O Foghlu, Secretary General of the Department of Education and Skills.

It considered the matter in light of the provisions of section 4 (1) (a) of the Standards in Public Office Act 2001, i.e. as to whether the Minister’s actions as complained of constituted a ‘specified act’ or acts.

It has decided that there is no basis on which to pursue the matter.

Having regard to a letter dated 7 February 1984 from the Secretary to the Government to Secretaries of Government Departments for the notice of Ministers which refers to payment of mileage allowances to Ministers using their own private cars in respect of “the total mileage travelled and related to the office”, the Commission noted that the rules allow for the use by officials of the Ministers’ car on official business.

Having regard to the issues which were raised in the complaint, the Standards Commission considers that the rules in place for claims by Ministers for traveling expenses incurred on official business while using their own private cars are not sufficiently transparent.

It has therefore written to the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform to request that he amend the rules under which Ministers claim traveling expenses for using their own private cars on official business.

It suggests that detailed claims in respect of each journey undertaken in the car along with the purpose of the journey be required in line with the rules which apply to public servants generally.

Yours sincerely

Brian McKevitt

Commission Secretariat