Ex-milk board employees paid €1.8m for doing nothing
A group of former milk board employees were paid for doing nothing by the Department of Agriculture over a seven-year period, it emerged today.
The workers lost their jobs when the Dublin and Cork Milk boards were sold to the private sector in 1992 and were promised that they would be re-allocated to jobs in the public sector.
The Oireachtas Committee of Public Accounts found that some workers were not redeployed for up to seven years.
According to its interim report, the total amount paid to 23 of the staff from the date of their redundancy to their appointment to departmental posts or their retirement was €1.8m.
“Efficient methods of redeploying surplus staff should be adopted in order to eliminate the incidence of staff being paid for doing no work,” it said.
Committee chairman Michael Noonan said it was vital that the Department of Agriculture learnt lessons from the experience because it would soon have to re-allocate 400 surplus staff.
“We’re saying redeploy the staff immediately to useful functions and don’t have them hanging around like the staff that were made redundant from the milk board.”
These department staff have become surplus to requirements since the EU’s Single Farm payment regime cut the number of cheques and forms being sent out to farmers.
Mr Noonan pointed out that the Department of Agriculture had been paying staff for no work before when the Land Commission was abolished in the 1970s.
“The Department of Agriculture literally had a whole cohort of civil servants on the payroll for years and they were never redeployed,” he said.
The sale of the milk boards, which had been set up in the 1930s to provide a guaranteed milk supply to Dublin and Cork, also cost the state a further 2.2 million euro. The new owners only paid statutory redundancy to the 50 workers being laid off and the state had to make up the difference. It sued the owners but the difficulties in calculating the redundancy payments meant that it had to settle for 250,000 euro in 2002.
The Committee of Public Accounts’ report also examined the Comptroller and Auditor General’s investigations into the farm advisory body Teagasc in 2003.
It found that a staff member had made false travel claims worth over €77,000 and that no action had been taken by management.
The staff member was forced to repay the full amount, plus interest and was reduced in grade and salary.
At another Teagasc centre, the Comptroller and Auditor General uncovered a conflict of interest case. A €336,000 contract to provide computerised farm data was given to a company which was 50% owned by a Teagasc employee.
The state body did not also properly record the value of property it sold off and was found to have made a surplus of three million euro at a time when it was making staff redundant.
Mr Noonan said there were serious auditing issues for Teagasc to address.
“Our recommendation is that they should have better financial controls generally,” he said.
The committee report also found the Department of Agriculture had operated a highly unusual arrangement to pay private companies for disposing of meat and bonemeal.
In 2003, it paid €23m into an ’escrow account’ which dispensed money to the companies over the following three years.
“The method of financing expenditure circumvented the principles underlining Government accounting and, if used as a precedent, could have repercussions for effective Dáil oversight of the public finances,” the report said.
