The Competition Authority has informed people who made complaints about alleged cartels that it cannot investigate their claims because of a staff shortage.

The authority's secretary, Mr Ciaran Quigley, said it had been unable to pursue any new inquiries into alleged cartels since January. It received 160 complaints last year and in 1998, he added.

It has also emerged that the authority's work programme for 2000 said it was unable to carry out its statutory functions because its professional staffing levels were a "disaster area".

The work programme, dated February 4th and released this week under the Freedom of Information Act, stated that resources were "inadequate" to meet its targets to enforce the competition acts.

It said: "The cartels section is unable to take on any new cases. A number of potentially serious cases which have recently come to light cannot be examined.

"In effect, it is not possible to respond to such complainants within seven days and even where complainants are contacted, further follow up is not possible.

"The imbalance between workload and resources has also meant that the target of responding to other complaints within one month is not being met and in a number of cases complainants have complained about the lack of response."

Mr Quigley said the authority had written to complainants in the past week to tell them it could not pursue their allegations.

He said the authority had 14 staff at the moment, 10 fewer than sanctioned. While the authority had five sanctioned positions for economists, it had only two people in that role at present, and only one of those was available to work on enforcement duties.

But Mr Quigley added that the authority was recruiting economists for permanent positions at the moment. A recruitment process for permanent legal staff, at higher grades than previously, had also begun.

Economists and legal staff were previously employed on a contract basis.

A consultants' examination into the authority's resource needs, sanctioned by the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, would begin next month, Mr Quigley said.

On staffing, the work programme said only about four or five cartel inquiries could be completed within a year, "a very small proportion of the number of complaints of alleged cartels received in any given year".

"In the absence of any additional resources being provided this would inevitably lead to a drop in the number of investigations completed."

It added: "The authority needs to be staffed at a realistic level and its staff, particularly professional staff, need a proper career structure to allow the authority to build up a degree of in-house experience. This is not the case at present. Professional staffing is a disaster area and the authority is unable to carry out its statutory functions."

Evidence of difficulty over resources at the authority first emerged last February, when its director of enforcement, Mr Pat Massey, resigned citing "wholly inadequate resources".

Responding, Ms Harney wrote that she was "disturbed" by suggestions in Mr Massey's letter that representations on staffing matters had not been acted on.