THERE WAS “a culture of non-compliance, part-compliance and circumvention” of appropriate procedure at executive level in Fás, the training authority’s chairman said yesterday.

Peter McLoone was responding to questions from the chairman of the Dáil Committee on Public Accounts, Bernard Allen TD.

Mr McLoone said the board dealt with the papers that were presented to it, but the board was never told that expenditure procedures in some areas were “out of control”. Mr McLoone was asked who had kept facts from the board. He said the board was presented with expenditure reports under certain headings but the overspending that had occurred in advertising occurred at a lower level.

He said he was explaining rather than justifying what had occurred.

The committee has asked that it be supplied with the minutes of executive board meetings so they can be reviewed.

The committee heard that the director of corporate affairs at Fás was commissioning advertising and doing other work for which an advertisement agency had been engaged. Jim O’Keeffe TD asked if there had been any inquiry into whether there was a “suspect reason” for this.

The newly-appointed director general of Fás, Paul O’Toole, said there had been an “informality” in the way certain marketing campaigns had been planned and executed. The organisation had been under pressure to achieve certain objectives.

Mr O’Keeffe said “millions were being spent without proper procedure and often with no return . . . and it was not picked up at executive level, or board level, or departmental level.”

This was far more than informality and left open the possibility that some money might have been “improperly spent”.

Mr McLoone said the board had, since February 2006, been working on establishing what had happened at corporate affairs and where culpability lay.

“I accept the work has been slow and torturous and painstaking. We have to [separate] fact from rumour so that when culpability is established, these matters can be dealt with better than they were in the past,” he said.

Deirdre Clune TD said €3.5 million was spent by Fás on TV, billboard and print advertisements aimed at primary school children in respect of the Fás Science Challenge programme.

She queried why the money was not spent on directly targeting the approximately 3,000 primary schools in the State.

The secretary general of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Seán Gorman, told Roisín Shortall TD that the chairman of a value for money study had resigned because of “frustration”.

He said a draft report on the “competency development programme” (CDP), a scheme that cost €140 million over recent years and which involves in-service training and upskilling, had been completed in June.

Mr Gorman said he had decided the report should not be finalised until an upcoming report from the Comptroller Auditor General, John Buckley, was published. The report would cover the CDP issue as well as other matters concerning Fás.

The resigning chairman had sent an e-mail to his superior in the department, Dermot Mulligan, who is on the Fás board, saying he was resigning “in the light of your questionable involvement in the role and work” of the committee, Mr Gorman said.

Ms Shortall said that, in principal, it was not acceptable that the review group should be reporting, in the first instance, to a director of Fás.

Mr Buckley said he was surprised to hear his pending report was holding up completion of the department’s report and that he would forward the relevant section of his report to the department at a early date. His report would be ready in a number of weeks, he said.

Mr Gorman said the value for money report would eventually be published.