What we learned about the €120,000 understatement of Ryan Tubridy’s earnings from committee

New light has been shone on the €120,000 understatement of Ryan Tubridy’s earnings from 2017 to 2019 by documents published by Noel Kelly ahead of Tuesday’s Oireachtas committee meeting and by the hearings. The amounts contained for Tubridy in the list of high earners, published in January 2021, were understated by €20,000 in 2017 and by €50,000 in each of the subsequent two years. This was part of the €345,000 in misreporting of his pay which sparked the controversy.

Mr Kelly’s documents indicate that this issue was raised in negotiations on Mr Tubridy’s new contract, due to run from 2020, and confirm that it was linked to an agreement that Mr Tubridy would not receive a bonus of €120,000 which had been due to be paid at the end of the previous contract.

Correspondence between Mr Kelly’s company and RTÉ show that the broadcaster proposed to “set off” this €120,000 savings from not paying the bonus against Mr Tubridy’s earnings in the earlier three years. It does not give any rationale for doing this. Mr Tubridy told the Public Accounts Committee that RTÉ had been warned that this would give an incorrect picture of Mr Tubridy’s earnings and that it appeared the idea had been dropped, as it did not appear in the final agreement on the termination of the 2015 to 2019 contract.

However, RTÉ subsequently revived the idea and the figures published in early 2021 were inaccurate, showing Mr Tubridy’s earnings for each of the three years at just below €500,000, when in fact they were above this level.

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The reason for not paying the €120,000 bonus was that Mr Tubridy did not undertake additional duties – including a series of eight TV programmes – which had been put in as possible tasks for him in the earlier contract, but never happened.

In an exchange of emails between Mr Kelly’s company and RTÉ in early 2020 – discussing the terms of the agreement on ending the old contact – Kelly’s side struck out the RTÉ proposed wording on this issue. This RTÉ proposal was to “set off” the €120,000 “against the original contracted service set out in the settlement but not sought by RTÉ or provided by the presenter during the contract term”. This wording did not appear in the final agreement and Kelly says he believed he had done what he could to highlight the issue.

However, RTÉ proceeded to “set off” the money when the figures were published in the high earners’ list the following January, which had the impact of reducing the reported payments to Tubridy to less than what he actually received for the three years.

Former RTÉ chief financial officer Breda O’Keeffe said in a statement last week that before she left the organisation she had been in discussion with Deloitte, the external auditors, about how the non-payment of the €120,000 bonus “could be treated for top talent earnings”, which is done on an accountancy accruals basis, counting liabilities as they occur. She said these discussions had not concluded before her exit.

The question now is on what basis RTÉ reduced the earnings figure for 2017 to 2019, as it had the effect of misleading the public about what the presenter earned in those years. Grant Thornton forensic accountants are looking at this decision and are due to report on it to the RTÉ board.