The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is to ask Beaumont Hospital to appear before it to explain what was described as “astounding” failures of governance.<\/p>\n
The hospital spent \u20ac17.9 million on “non-compliant procurement” in 2024, the committee heard.<\/p>\n
This included \u20ac1.5m paid to a radiology firm of which 20 hospital staff members are directors.<\/p>\n
Only four of them declared their directorships in their statements of interest to the hospital, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) Seamus McCarthy revealed.<\/p>\n
Deputy Paul McAuliffe, Fianna F\u00e1il, said he had never before seen so many items flagged in a report to the PAC.<\/p>\n
“It’s unusual,” Mr McCarthy agreed.<\/p>\n
Last October, Beaumont Hospital faced a grilling from PAC over financial management for 2023, with the focus on a significant overspend on a new IT system.<\/p>\n
Committee Chairman Sinn F\u00e9in TD John Brady said the committee had heard “new information, concerning information” from the Comptroller and Auditor General over the hospital’s spending in 2024.<\/p>\n
That year, Beaumont Hospital’s deficit increased by more than half, surging by over \u20ac17.6m.<\/p>\n
Comptroller Seamus McCarthy said that the hospital’s accumulated non-capital deficit stood at \u20ac51.3m at the end of 2024, up from \u20ac33.7m the previous year, which he described as “a significant increase”.<\/p>\n
Staff overpayments of \u20ac195,000 were written off, while another \u20ac704,000 had yet to be recovered.<\/p>\n
Delays in submitting insurance claims cost the hospital a further \u20ac413,000, a sum it could have collected had those claims been submitted on time.<\/p>\n
The committee heard that the IT system was eventually deployed in 2024 at a final project cost of \u20ac4.8m – more than double the projected cost of \u20ac2m.<\/p>\n
“Public procurement guidelines were not followed for the procurement of the system and revenue, interest and penalty costs of \u20ac66,000 had been incurred as a result of payroll processing failures,” Mr McCarthy added.<\/p>\n
He agreed with Fine Gael TD James Geoghegan that the \u20ac1.5m paid to radioology services was new information that had not been raised at last October’s meeting.<\/p>\n
“And this seems to be almost identical to the issues that we dealt with with St James’s Hospital,” the deputy said, adding that the CEO of St James’s had apologised over the matter at his appearance at PAC.<\/p>\n
There are identical governance failings in the same area in both institutions, he said, with a failure to meet Standards in Public Office disclosure requirements.<\/p>\n
Social Democrats TD Aidan Farrelly described the revelations as “astounding” and “quite concerning”.<\/p>\n
The chairman agreed with the deputies’ demand that Beaumont Hospital return to the committee to explain the spending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is to ask Beaumont Hospital to appear before it to explain what was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-401711","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401711","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=401711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}