Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) accepted \u20ac30,000 from a concession holder towards the cost of a staff Christmas party in 2022, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has heard.<\/p>\n
Comptroller and Auditor General Seamus McCarthy, said it “raises concern about decision making”.<\/p>\n
He said his staff identified the funds in a CHI account and queried it.<\/p>\n
He said the “explanation that was provided then gave rise to concerns”.<\/p>\n
Mr McCarthy said the related hospitality expenditure was not disclosed in the 2022 financial statements, “as was required”.<\/p>\n
The unreleased funding was returned to the concession holder following a query during the 2024 audit, he said.<\/p>\n
He said when it was “brought to the attention of the board of the hospital, they decided to return the funding”.<\/p>\n
He said there were concerns around the event itself, “which should have been disclosed” in the governance statement, and the “propriety of accepting contributions from a concession holder”.<\/p>\n
Mr McCarthy said this “muddies the waters in terms of the competitiveness of the award of a concession”.<\/p>\n
Fine Gael TD Joe Neville asked if this is a “common occurrence”.<\/p>\n
It seemed to have been a one-off, responded Mr McCarthy.<\/p>\n
Mr Neville said it was “bizarre” that the payment would be offered and accepted.<\/p>\n
He said it could be seen as “almost like a kickback to the company”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) accepted \u20ac30,000 from a concession holder towards the cost of a staff Christmas party…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-354979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}