Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald has said she will "carefully consider" any proposals from An Garda Síochána to speed up investigations into white collar crime.
She was responding to reports that the lead agencies responsible for prosecuting financial crime are chronically short of resources.
A prominent barrister said recently that the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation had been "swamped" with reports of alleged white-collar crime since 2011, when it became an offence not to report them. Remy Farrell SC told the Bar Council conference the bureau was receiving such a volume of complaints that it was struggling to process many of them. Of those cases that gardaí had the time to consider, just one in 10 resulted in a prosecution, he added.
Ms Fitzgerald said she recently received a detailed report on the fraud bureau from acting Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan. “The acting Garda Commissioner has told me that the main challenge the Garda is facing is the rapidly changing environment in which fraudsters and white collar criminals operate,” Ms Fitzgerald said. “This owes to changing technology, criminality and questionable business practices.”
Dáil questions
She was responding to Dáil questions from Sinn Féin justice spokesman Pádraig Mac Lochlainn.
Ms Fitzgerald said the acting commissioner had initiated a comprehensive review of An Garda’s capacity to deal with emerging and complex crime, and this would have an important bearing on how the fraud bureau did its work.
“The Government moved rapidly to provide new legislation with the Criminal Justice Act 2011, which served to help to speed up investigations into white collar crime. The acting commissioner is aware that I will give careful consideration to additional proposals from the Garda authorities in this regard.”
Describing a chronically underfunded system, Mr Farrell, a specialist in white collar crime who has acted for the State in a number of high-profile cases, said it was a “national scandal” that there was just one forensic accountant working for the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) and that there were delays of two to three years in specialist computer analysis.
His comments followed those of Ian Drennan of the ODCE, who said he would need at least five forensic accountants to make the office "credible".
Ms Fitzgerald said it was “critical” that the ODCE accountancy posts were filled.
