PAC to examine TUSLA’s financial statements

Committee Chairman Seán Fleming said: “The Child and Family Agency (TUSLA) is the dedicated State agency responsible for improving wellbeing and outcomes for children. There are a number of issues arising from its 2016 financial statements which the Committee may wish to raise at tomorrow’s meeting.

TUSLA stated that there are limited resources available to it and that it is not possible for it to provide complete assurance over all of the monies provided to all grant aided agencies. Given the extent of the public funds involved and the nature of the agencies being funded, it is worrying for the Committee that the level of assurance is compromised by limited resources and we will want details of the limited resources that are available.

Legal fees for TUSLA itself and in respect of Guardian ad Litem service total nearly €22m in 2016. How legal services were procured and any measures that TUSLA have taken to reduce the level of legal costs will be of interest to the committee.”

The agency states that due to the limited resources within the ICT infrastructure, it does not have the facility to implement real time controls but will continue to rely heavily on manual review processes to ensure compliance with procurement guidelines. Given that TUSLA is responsible for non-pay expenditure of approximately €425m it is worrying that insufficient ICT resources limits its capacity to fulfil its obligations in relation to procurement. The Committee will want to know why TUSLA does not have the required level of ICT resources and what action is being taken to address this.

In 2016, in order to assess current governance and control arrangements, TUSLA commissioned a programme of 15 internal audits as part of the internal audit plan for grant funded agencies. In addition the Agency commenced a programme to audit the largest funded agencies and completed the internal audit on the largest grant funded agency in 2016. The audit of one of the top five largest grant funded agencies is being conducted in 2017. We will be interested to find out the status of the internal audits commenced in 2016.

This PAC meeting will start in Committee room 3 at 9am on Thursday, 19 October 2017.