City manager warns of action over illegal allocation of houses

DUBLIN CITY manager John Tierney has promised that any staff found to have acted inappropriately in the allocation of council houses will be punished.

Members of the public who have acted illegally by obtaining accommodation for which they are not qualified would also be pursued, Mr Tierney has told councillors in a report.

Of 50 accommodation files examined by the council’s internal audit committee, six houses were found to have been misallocated and irregularities were found in another six, according to Mr Tierney’s report.

All the files involved allocations on the basis of “medical priority”. The manager claimed that of the six cases of misallocation, only one actually resulted in a misallocation, as the other five people involved would have been housed anyway, due to their circumstances.

He was anxious to bring issues raised by the audit committee to finality as soon as possible: “If any staff member is found to have acted inappropriately, then the relevant disciplinary actions will be set in train.

“Also, if any member of the public has been found to have engaged in an unlawful manner, this will be pursued.”

Equally, he added, if the exoneration of staff was necessary, this would be highlighted.

The investigation began two years ago after a council house was misallocated to a person who had not been awarded medical priority status.

It was delayed by a grievance complaint by a member of staff, but eventually widened to take in a sample of 50 files.

Mr Tierney said the process of investigation was complicated and delayed by circumstances which, he said, would not be appropriate to outline in his report.

The committee, in a wider examination of the allocation process, found numerous deficiencies, including an absence of formal paperwork and required sign-off, errors in the entry of information and inconsistencies between data stored on different systems.

In the cases of misallocation, it was found that the chief medical officer (CMO) either rejected the application for medical priority or did not adjudicate on the cases. Papers referred to a number of CMOs who had not provided services for some years.

Mr Tierney distributed his report at the end of last Monday’s meeting of the council, at which Independent councillor Mannix Flynn sought an investigation. Discussion on Mr Flynn’s motion was postponed to next month.

Fine Gael councillor Gerry Breen said the investigation pointed to evidence of sloppy procedures rather than fraud, but this still needed to be corrected.