One of the most important public offices in the state is also one of the public offices about which the public hears least: The Comptroller and Auditor General. The C&AG, as the office is customarily known, is responsible for auditing the accounts of, at the time of writing, 287 publicly funded bodies, certifying their accounts and signing off on the fact that they have spent their public money as it was intended. The list of bodies subject to the oversight of the C&AG includes universities, health and training boards, and the courts service, amongst many more.
The current C&AG, Seamus McCarthy, is entering his second decade in the job, having been appointed in May of 2012 after a career in the civil service. For the avoidance of doubt, there is no suggestion in this piece that he has been anything other than a diligent public servant – but at the end of the day, that’s just what he is. A civil servant like any other, with a civil servant’s motivations and view of the job.
The larger problem is that this state has a recurrent problem with what one might term a cavalier attitude to public money. From the current RTÉ scandal (RTÉ do not, at present, come under the remit of the C&AG, though it has been suggested that they should) to the cost of the Children’s Hospital, to the FAI and Fás, a very high proportion of Irish political scandals have a financial element to them concerning the mis-use of, or perhaps just carelessness with, public funds.
One simple solution to this – and I confess I’ve stolen this idea from my friend Jason O’Mahony who mentioned it in passing at the end of an excellent piece about attitudes to public money in the state sector – would be to make the C&AG a more adversarial role, and to increase both its powers and its independence.
There is at present only one nationally elected public office in Ireland – the Presidency. The President has a very limited constitutional role, and while he or she may stray outside of that, the election and the office are largely symbolic rather than impactful. Adding a second nationally elected office (which would require a referendum) is something that the state – and anyone seriously interested in improving it – should, in my view, consider.
There are several obvious benefits to changing the C&AG to an elected role, with an overtly adversarial purpose.
First, it would improve political accountability: Establishing an elected office outside the Government with the power to pull accounts from any public body and investigate the spending practices of any body receiving public funds would immediately, simply by the existence of the office, create an additional incentive to care with public funds.
Second, it would enhance the functioning of the office by imbuing it with energy: At the moment, the C&AG is effectively a career posting for a civil servant, with no great reward for the holder if he or she succeeds in uncovering malpractice or incompetence in the spending of public money. The evidence for this is that few, if any, people could name the current incumbent. A C&AG with more of a policing role, with a public mandate to seek out issues in publicly funded bodies rather than simply uncovering them passively, would be much more of an energetic office. The incentive of needing re-election, or seeking future office, would add an additional level of motivation to the role.
Third, it would spread political power around, a little, which is desperately necessary. While we live in a parliamentary democracy which has an opposition, the Oireachtas like every Westminster-based system effectively turns the Government into an elected dictatorship with a monopoly on the wielding of political power. An office independent of the Government that had the power to pro-actively investigate the spending of public money, and an incentive to expose the very things that Governments have an incentive to cover-up, would dramatically alter the balance of political power and make Governments more wary and alert to sniffing out issues in their own ranks before the C&AG did.
Fourth, it would provide an alternative to the current political career path: For too many people, politics in Ireland has a defined structure: A few years as a councillor, followed by a decade as a backbencher, before finally getting charge of an enormous Government department after years spent outside of any kind of management role. It is not a structure which lends itself to the promotion of competent Ministers.
An alternative career path, leading an office nationally elected with a team of forensic auditors and a remit to pro-actively seek out governance issues, would no doubt be much more attractive to talented people than the idea of spending a decade doing an apprenticeship in funeral attendance. As well as putting the fear of God into politicians, the office might well draw talented people into public service.
Of course, none of this would work without an expansion in the powers of the office, as well as its scope: All NGOs should be brought under its remit, as should bodies receiving state grants. If money were to leave the public treasury, it should leave only with the proviso that those who receive it must account for how it is spent to the public spending watchdog.
This is not an especially radical proposal – outside of the constitutional change necessary to enact it – but it would, I feel, make an enormous difference to the attitude to public money that is too often pervasive across Ireland’s public sector.