Department given two weeks to examine files

The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee has given the secretary general of the Department of Finance two weeks to check files for any initiatives taken on bogus accounts.

Mr Jim Mitchell also said he found it "very, very perturbing" that the Department's management initiative committee, like the Revenue Commissioners, did not keep minutes of its meetings. The committee deals with all major policy issues confronting the Department, as well as major staffing and "housekeeping" issues.

He asked the secretary general, Mr Paddy Mullarkey, to check the files as well for initiatives taken by the management initiative committee to confront and quantify the issue of bogus non-resident accounts.

Mr Mullarkey said, however, that the Civil Service tradition "has been criticised for having too much on paper. Very often initiatives are taken on foot of discussion . . . it's very rarely that someone will identify that a wheel should be invented. That is not the way the system works."

Committee members questioned the secretary general about what attempts his department had made to quantify the level of bogus accounts and to deal with them. Mr Mitchell said he was "quite honestly very puzzled by the apparent lack of initiative or response by the secretaries of the Department of Finance on the issue of DIRT at virtually any time".

He said that when he was minister of three departments - Justice, Posts and Telegraphs, and Transport - he knew what happened at management initiative meetings because minutes were kept, section by section.

"I have expressed yesterday and again today my puzzlement at the silence of the files in relation to secretary generals. Now we are told that there are no minutes of management committees. I find this deeply, deeply perturbing, especially in view of the fact that there are minutes of meetings with people like the Irish Banking Federation."

He did not want to do Mr Mullarkey or any of his predecessors "an injustice" so he asked him to come back within a fortnight after checking the Department's files.

"We had many quotations here about people who are not civil servants in the Department of Finance about what they said and what they did and what they didn't do and who took the initiative but there is no record of the secretary generals taking initiatives and I am puzzled.

"I want you to go and again probe your files to see if there's anything which will show that a secretary general, either yourself or any of your predecessors from 1986 to 1998, took any initiative."

The senior civil servant agreed with Mr Pat Rabbitte that most of the legislation his Department dealt with when he became secretary general in 1994 was to do with money laundering and serious crime.

Questioning Mr Mullarkey about the role and membership of the management initiative committee, Mr Mitchell asked if it discussed the "bogus non-resident account issue" in the years being dealt with by the committee - from 1986 to 1998.

Mr Mullarkey doubted that it came up as a specific issue. Not keeping minutes of committee meetings was not "particularly" that something might be revealed subsequently, it was much more that "there are an awful lot of busy people there". He said each head of division might have jotted down what particular points they were to follow up.

He reiterated that "historically the Civil Service has been under fire for too much paper, too many records - all this sort of thing. You know, it's very difficult to get the balance right. On this particular issue, there was never a sense of a need for these," he said.