Enterprise Ireland plays down internal audit criticism

Enterprise Ireland’s internal auditors have not identified any sums of money owed to it by grant-receiving companies that relocated Irish jobs overseas, a spokesman for the State agency has said.

Speaking on RTÉ's This Week programme yesterday, Fianna Fáil spokesman on jobs Dara Calleary said he intended to raise in the Oireachtas the contents of three internal audit reports criticising the agency.

The reports, obtained by RTÉ under the Freedom of Information Act, highlight a case where financial support was given to a company to create jobs in Kilkenny, but some of the posts ended up located in Australia and Bulgaria. "No proof of location of employee was sought or confirmed," the audit team noted.

The agency spokesman said this particular company was actually exceeding its job expansion targets in the Republic, and that the case was “open”, meaning its normal external reviews were not yet due to take place.

He said it was standard practice for multinationals to move particular employees to different countries, but under the rules of the grant system the expectation would be that the post for which the grant was awarded would remain in Ireland. He said Enterprise Ireland has regularly clawed back grants from companies that subsequently relocated jobs that should have remained in Ireland

50 companies
The Job Expansion Scheme, the largest budget scheme the auditors examined, provided almost €6 million to more than 50 companies in 2012.

The auditors also highlighted issues with a €1.3 million scheme aimed at linking graduates and companies, with one unpublished report finding “the approach to scoring applicant companies lacked transparency and was poorly structured and controlled”.

Auditors found “several instances where relatively low scoring applicants were successful and where some high scoring applicants were rejected”.

This was a pilot scheme, run on a competitive basis with country-by-country quotas, the spokesman said. Some companies from the UK that scored highly were rejected, while companies from countries with fewer applicants were more likely to be approved.