A PARTNERSHIP forum in the health service has been unable to account for its disbursement of €770,000 in State funding provided to a Siptu representative, a new HSE internal audit report has found.
The report, to be given to the Dáil Public Accounts Committee today, says the level of diligence usually shown by the Health Service National Partnership Forum in controlling and disbursing public funds was not extended to how State money provided under a programme known as the action plan for people management (APPM) was given to the Siptu representative.
Instead of the forum receiving and validating claims from different trade unions for funding under the programme, it paid the money over in lump sums to Siptu for it to validate and disburse to other trade unions.
It says an undocumented change to the forum’s own process for managing the funding to unions under the programme “resulted in four payments totalling €750,205 being made to Siptu in four lump sums, some of which were subsequently paid to other unions”.
“Following contact from HSE internal audit, four unions [identified as Impact, the INMO, the IMO and Unite] confirmed they had received, but had not yet spent, the funds and that they would repay the money to the HSE. In total the four unions refunded €275,283.13 to the HSE.”
The audit found the union joint chair/Siptu representative (whom it does not identify) “in effect became the manager of a substantial proportion of the trade union APPM fund provided to the Health Service National Partnership Forum and for which Health Service National Partnership Forum was responsible”.
It also said the union joint chair/ Siptu representative was considered by management of the forum to have been a key driver in the establishment of the body itself. This resulted in a close working relationship forming whereby the union joint chair’s role as chair of the forum (or chair of the board) overlapped with the executive role of management, it said.
“This resulted in a lack of distance between the union joint chair/Siptu representative and Health Service National Partnership Forum officials.”
The forum director, who retired in 2009, told the HSE audit that the union joint chair/Siptu representative had a strong working relationship across the health and local authority services. He did not accept that his relationship with forum officials was in any way inappropriate or that he had exercised an executive role since 2002.
The audit said that while the size of the APPM funds represented only 4 per cent of the forum’s total income and expenditure, this was not important.
“What is important is that all taxpayers’ funds are properly controlled, expended and accounted for. This did not happen in the case of €818,324 (€770,000 unvouched and €48,324 inadequately vouched) APPM funding provided to Siptu.”
Among its findings, the audit said:
- forum management relied on the union joint chair’s written assertion that he had validated the claims of other unions (in relation to funding);
- due to the lack of records maintained by the union joint chair/Siptu representative, Siptu is unable to provide documentation to state how the funds were expended.
