FAS Ashfield audit report

More from our FAS file. This is the audit report that was carried out in relation to Ashfield Computer Training (ACT). The company received € 30,264.00 via the FAS CDP scheme in 2006, €464,044.00 in 2007 and €443,361.57 in 2008, a total of €937,669.57. We don’t yet have figures for 2009. FAS director general Paul O’Toole has said that money could not be recovered from Ashfield Computer Training, because the company was liquidated earlier this year.

Critically, the report states, among other things:

no explanation was provided by ACT as to why the date created for the NEWSLETTER document in the Word Processing 2 module was 28 August 2007; two months after the course finished.

In the case of the NEWSLETTER document produced in the Word assessment there were 6 candidates whose documents were identical and contained a series of errors that suggest the document was copied. In the Integrated Applications the consistent use of the same incorrect pie-chart also suggested that the assessment material had been manipulated.

There was material missing from both the printed assessment material and from disk. In the view of Internal Audit, ACT were unable to provide a reasonable explanation as to how learner’s had passed these assessments in the absence of such essential material.

…it is the view of internal Audit that efforts were made on the part of the tutor to ensure that learners, who had not achieved a sufficient level in some assessments, were assisted in achieving a pass level after the assessment was completed.


Banks QE themselves

It seems we have something of an answer as to how Irish banks expect to get through the €30bn funding cliff this month. In the Irish Times today:

IRISH NATIONWIDE has issued €4 billion of Government-guaranteed bonds effectively to itself. It can use the bonds to draw €4 billion in funding from the European Central to help tide it over a key refinancing period later this month.

The building society has €4 billion of debt covered under the original blanket Government guarantee maturing at the end of this month. The bonds will allow the building society to draw fresh funding from the ECB if necessary to repay this debt against a backdrop of heightened funding pressures across the guaranteed institutions.

So what does that mean? Irish Nationwide is issuing bonds (these ones) and then using the bonds as collateral to borrow from the ECB marginal lending facility (MLF), also known as the discount window.

This is not dissimilar from the practice we learned of last week where nationalised bank, Anglo Irish, is using promissory notes issued by the Government as part of recapitalisation (ostensibly long term), as collateral with our own Central Bank in order to fund itself (they dare not go to the ECB?), at a rate of 1:1. This appears to have gone relatively unnoticed, and is buried in Anglo’s interim report, referred to as the Special Master Repurchase Agreement, which comes on top of the Master Loan Repurchase Agreement.

Expect to see other Irish bank create fictitious money in order to fund themselves via the discount window.

It also seems that this type of transaction is nothing new. Back before the September 2008 crisis, it seems that Lehman Brothers were doing something similar. Per the FT back in April 2008:

It was rather elliptically suggested by Bloomberg (from a Morgan Stanley analysis) that Freedom’s notes had been used as collateral by Lehman in the Fed’s primary dealer credit facility. And that that was – in the main – the reason the CLO had been created and successfully closed.

But there’s some confusion. In this article, Bloomberg say Lehman sold the $2.2bn of senior notes in Freedom “in a private placement”, which can’t be true if they’re being used in repos with the Fed by Lehman. As for the equity tranche, it’s unrated, so the NY Fed won’t accept it as collateral.

The WSJ reports that only some of the senior notes may actually have been pledged to the Fed. The small amount was supposed to “test” what the Fed would accept.

Since the test seems to have gone well, can other banks be expected to jump on the CLO bandwagon? JP Morgan is understood to be doing just that – with rumours of senior notes of a recently closed CLO being pledged in the PCDF.
But even if Freedom, and other CLOs, were created with the express intent of pledging notes to get liquid collateral through the PCDF, so what?

And it wasn’t only in the US this was happening. In the UK these are referred to as ‘phantom securities’:

In the depths of the financial crisis, the Old Lady began expanding the bank collateral eligible for use at its various liquidity operations, and starting new ones up. Unsurprisingly, given market conditions at the time, banks flocked to make use of the facilities. In fact, they began creating things specifically for use at the BoE, which the Bank gave the attention-grabbing title of ‘phantom securities.’

Some day, we will eventually we will have to confront reality, and stop this merry-go-round of fiction.

Digest – August 6 2010

Late but like, wahevz. As my 16 year old cousin may say.

HOME

Markham Nolan is blogging his way through east Africa while on a Simon Cumbers Fund media funded. Would make a lovely short-term column, I say.

Monopoly houses set to float down the Liffey, Dublin Observer reports.

Ciaran Cuffe advocates property tax in blog musing, according to the Sunday Tribune, then deletes the post. It’s still in the Google Cache though, his exact words were…

A huge challenge over the coming months is how we close the gap between the State’s income and expenditure. Either way it looks as though we have to narrow the budget gap by another three billion euro next year. An additional increase in income tax on working families would be hugely challenging, and perhaps we should instead be considering some kind of domestic charge, as we had prior to the ‘give-away’ budget of 1977.

There’s no easy way to fill the gap, but an alternative to a hike in income tax rates on middle income earners would be to take the radical step of abolishing (or dramatically reducing) stamp duty on homes and introduce an annual levy based on the size of the house. Maybe large homes could pay €600 a year, medium sized home €400 and smaller home €200. How would you define this? A home over 200 sq.m might be at the larger end of things, and under 100 sq. m could be in the smaller category. It all could be done by self-assessment. If home-owners couldn’t pay, then the levy could remain as a charge on the home when it eventually changed hands.

I’d say such a charge could raise the guts of several hundred million, and would be more equitable than a rise in income tax. The beauty of such a scheme is that it could be implemented quickly without a cumbersome State led assessment of each property. Another advantage would be that it would allow people to move home when they wish without an excessive tax burden.

Story from last week; ‘Nama to decide on future of funding for Anglo building‘.

Anglo HQ, Docklands

Alternative headline, ‘Nama to decide on completion of half-built office block owned by tax-payer in centre of mass of empty office blocks’. Leave it as it is and turn it into a museum. Primary school classes can take tours around it as guides explain in hushed tones about the extinct species of property agents and Celtic Tigers. ‘A monument to folly’, as Gav christened it as we walked past it one night.

McGarr on regulators.

Stephen Kinsella on the transformation of private debt into public debt.

Gormley, incinerators and the constitution. PucktownLane has an interesting take.

Karl Whelan; Anglo’s plan to save sub-ordinated debt holders.

WORLD Continue reading “Digest – August 6 2010”

FAS funds and SIPTU/ICTU

On the subject of:

THE TÁNAISTE Mary Coughlan yesterday sought to play down a controversy with the European Commission that has brought a halt to the claiming of tens of millions of euro in European Social Fund payments.

Her department confirmed that a claim for €57 million spent by Fás on training and which was to be repaid by Europe, was withdrawn because of issues raised by European audits.

A prominent trade unionist has criticised a call for FAS to be shut down:

The Labour Party’s spokesman on education, the former minister for labour Ruairí Quinn, has called for Fás to be “shut down” as a result of this latest blow to its credibility. He said some of its budget should be transferred to educational institutions such as institutes of technology.

This sparked an angry trade union reaction from Siptu and Ictu president Jack O’Connor who is also a long-time member of the Labour Party’s national executive.“Ruairí Quinn was undoubtedly the best minister for finance in my lifetime but he is totally and completely wrong in his call for closing down Fás,” Mr O’Connor said.

Total amount SIPTU College received via the FAS Competency Development Programme (CDP) (2003 to 2008 inclusive): €2,068,571.6

Total amount ICTU received via the FAS Competency Development Programme (CDP) (2003 to 2008 inclusive): €2,460,274.73

Total for SIPTU and ICTU: €4,528,846.33

SIPTU and ICTU were two of the top 10 recipients of FAS CDP money from 2003 to 2008.

I think maybe Mr O’Connor should have mentioned these figures.

HSE briefing papers Sep 09 to Jun 10

Some time ago I sought all briefing papers used by HSE staff for appearances before Oireachtas committees between September 1, 2009 and June 14, 2010, inclusive.

Here are seven sets of them:



Search and retrieval: €29,141.45

Four weeks ago I sought what I believed to be reasonably standard information from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation (DETI). Among the things I sought were:

The appointments diary of the Minister for 2008 and 2009.

All speaking/talking points prepared for the Minister from January 2009 to July 2010, inclusive.

The FOI requests log for the Department from January 2007 to July 2010 inclusive. This should include the requestor, what was requested, the date of the request, and any other information recorded.

An export of the expenses database of the Department. I understand the Department uses Oracle iExpense to record expenses data.

I often ask many Departments for similar information, so I have some understanding of how these records are held, and the amount of work involved in releasing them. I have sent almost identical requests to other Departments, and been charged little or no search and retrieval fees (under the Act, a public body can charge €20.95 an hour to find and retrieve stuff). But never before have I received a fee request as big as this one from DETI:

€29,141.45

A record for thestory.ie.

This was broken down as follows, for each part in turn:

1) 1 Staff, 10 Hours, €209.50
2) 45 Staff, 1,310 Hours, €27,444.50
3) 1 Staff, 7 Hours, €146.65
4) 4 Staff, 64 Hours, €1,340.80

So to be clear, let’s take each of these in turn.

1) The Department believes it would take one staff member 10 hours to print out or photocopy the appointments diary of the minister over two years. We believe this diary is held electronically, so they are saying it would take one staff member 10 hours to click “print”. Even if it was held in hard copy, it does not take 10 hours to photocopy (most Ministerial diaries are well under 150 pages per year). The Department cannot charge for the time it takes to redact information. As readers are aware, we have ministerial diaries from other departments covering many years, we have never been charged for these.

2) The Department claims that: “These records are maintained by individual Business Units in the Department who are responsible for preparing the notes in question for the Minister. As you can appreciate, the remit of this Department is so wide and covers so many areas, that the retrieval of speaking/talking points for the Minister for the 19-month period covered by your request would involve the examination of over 900 files, containing several thousand records.”

However we have previously been issued with speaking notes for one media appearance that was collated into one document, and given a heading. We will explore this further. But we do have in mind that most if not all documents are stored electronically.

3) Most Departments hold their FOI requests log in the form of a spreadsheet. So again, I’m being charged €146.65 for clicking “print”. If it’s not a spreadsheet then it’s a hard copy containing the name of the requestor, the date of the request, what was requested and sometimes other information. At most, such a log would contain a few dozen pages. Again, charging €146.65 for this information is nothing short of ludicrous. How it would take one staff member nearly a fully working day to perform this task is beyond me.

4) I’ve been down this road with other public bodies. Exporting a database actually requires no search and retrieval time whatever. It is simply a matter of exporting the data to a spreadsheet. Any other requests seeking Oracle data has not incurred a charge from any other Department. How it would take four staff 64 hours to export from a database is again beyond me, especially given the fact that such processes are automated.

A reader I met recently didn’t realise just how much time and resources it takes to get information out of public bodies. This is only one example. I will be contacting the Department to either clarify my position, or appeal for internal review on the fee alone. And even if my €75 appeal is successful, I don’t get the €75 back. That’s fair, isn’t it?

Front Line funding

We note that Denis O’Brien’s charity Front Line did not receive European Commission funding last year. In figures recently released by the Commission, Front Line does not feature for 2009, despite appearing as a recipient in 2008. That year, Front Line received €1,801,679 from the European Commission.

But he will no doubt be cheered with the €450,000 the charity received in 2009 from the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the €450,000 also received in 2008. There is no sign yet of Foreign Affairs giving money to the charity for 2010.