RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst is expected to tell a Dáil committee on Wednesday that the broadcaster has to date handed over more than €4 million in unpaid social welfare contributions related to the misclassification of some workers in the organisation as self-employed contractors.
The former BBC News editor will update the Committee on the Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport on a range of issues at the broadcaster, including a process to settle the employment status of around 700 workers.
According to a copy of his opening remarks seen by The Irish Times, Mr Bakhurst is expected to say that RTÉ has made payments of €1.1 million to the Revenue Commissioners to date relating to an audit of its finances that began last year.
In the appendix to his remarks submitted ahead of Wednesday’s meeting, RTÉ noted a €3.2 million settlement to the Department of Social Protection relating to its review of some 655 alleged cases of Pay Related Social Insurance (PRSI) misclassification at the broadcaster.
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[ RTÉ confirms €3.6m write down on partly abandoned IT projectOpens in new window ]
Mr Bakhurst is expected to tell the committee that the department has reviewed 82 per cent of the cases and found that 60 per cent, or 388, were correctly classified as contractors.
Some 124 cases, or 18 per cent of the total, remain outstanding, according to the documents submitted to the committee.
In recent years, RTÉ set aside some €22.6 million as a provision to cover the cost of potential PRSI settlements and penalties. The total provision had fallen to just €21 million at the end of April, according to the documents.
Mr Bakhurst is also expected to tell the committee that any move to completely abandon a troubled IT project and switch to a new supplier in the middle of its delivery would have cost the broadcaster at least €3 million.
RTÉ ultimately took a €3.7 million financial hit on the partially abandoned project to replace its legacy finance and human resources system. The broadcaster said at the time that the impairments were noted in its annual accounts during the years 2020 to 2023.
Mr Bakhurst said at the time that he was not aware of the write-down until March, when details were shared with media minister Patrick O’Donovan as part of a wider review of capital projects, initiated after the controversy over the Arts Council’s spending on a botched IT project.
Mr Bakhurst will reiterate to the committee that the project was an “outlier” in a “much larger portfolio” of capital projects.
The review found that the “total variance” from the initial budget for 39 large-scale projects undertaken by RTÉ since 2020 was less than €500,000, Mr Bakhurst is expected to say.
The committee will also hear that “any attempt to abandon the project” or switch to the runner-up supplier in the procurement process, “would have immediately incurred an extra cost of at least €3 million”.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland programme on Tuesday, media committee chairman and Labour Party TD Alan Kelly said some of the focus of Wednesday’s session will be on the department because of the “history” of similar issues at other bodies like the Arts Council.
While he said the writedowns were noted in RTÉ’s accounts, it was difficult to “comprehend” the scale of the costs “if you see it written off over a number of years”. Mr Kelly said the broadcaster may not have attempted to hide the issue, “but certainly, there wasn’t an attempt to make it very public”.
This story was updated on May 28 to correct the total variance from budget of large scale projects in the fourth last paragraph to less than €500,000.
