Firm that ran courses for Fás fixed test results - FG

A COMPANY in the northeast contracted by State training agency Fás to conduct courses “fixed” the results of assessment tests, Fine Gael TD Fergus O’Dowd has claimed. Mr O’Dowd said the company was contracted to give “important courses costing tens of thousands of euro”.

“People pass the tests who could never have passed. Dates of tests have been changed,” he said. “The whole arrangement is a fix, a con, and it is a disgrace.”

If “a teacher were to change the results of a candidate’s test in order to give him or her a pass mark, this would bring the exam system into disrepute. Fás has been discredited as a national organisation because of the antics, waste of money, arrogance, complacency and lack of accountability, which continues in Fás in this specific case.”

Mr O’Dowd added: “The situation cannot be allowed to continue in which a company falsifies results and is then given another contract and then falsifies those results as well.”

He was speaking after Minister for Enterprise Mary Coughlan introduced the Labour Services (Amendment) Bill. Ms Coughlan said the Bill was part of the response to “ensure that Fás is fit for purpose and operates under the highest standards of corporate governance”.

Measures in the legislation include a reduction in the number of board members from 17 to 11; appointment of board members on the basis of relevant experience and measures to prohibit staff and board members from engaging in procurement matters where a conflict of interest exists.

Ms Coughlan was not in the Dáil, however, when Mr O’Dowd made his allegations.

He said an audit was carried out due to concerns about the unnamed company.

Mr O’Dowd has contacted the Fás director general’s office “and requested the company’s name because we are entitled to know it, what it was paid and why it continued to provide further courses when there was evidence that one course in particular had been manipulated”.

Following an internal audit it would have been expected that further contracts “would be conducted with integrity and meet the clear standards set down by the certifying bodies”, but the evidence was that “this did not happen”.

The issue first came to light in a computer-aided design course, he said. The company accepted in 2007 that “the assessment material had become unreliable”. However, “it ran further courses and the same issues still arose, but it did not address the initial problem”.

Mr O’Dowd said the situation was “serious and damning” in which Fás “has allowed contracted companies to do its business” but did not maintain oversight.

It appeared that the company was facing no sanction, he said, and asked what action had been taken by City Guilds and other independent examining bodies that run courses on behalf of Fás.