20 Interview ACCOUNTANCY IRELAND APRIL 2017
Interview 21 Serving the public good Seamus McCarthy, the Comptroller and Auditor General, is no stranger to the media. He recently spoke to Accountancy Ireland about his key objectives, whistle-blowing, and life in the public eye. BY FIONA REDDAN He is the State’s financial watchdog, auditing and reporting on the use of public funds and ascertaining whether the State is getting value for money from its public sector. “It’s an aid to the parliamentary accountability process and is the most visible aspect of it,” Comptroller and Auditor General, Seamus McCarthy, says of his office. It is also about ensuring value for money for the people who fund public services – the taxpayers. “It does serve a public good; everybody in society has to deal with the State. Nobody is neutral on the public sector, so they’re entitled to know what’s happening and what they’re paying for,” he says. “There needs to be that constant accountability to taxpayers and to citizens.” The Comptroller and Auditor General’s office provides this feedback by reporting on and auditing public sector bodies, and there is a considerable number of these – some 300 entities in total – ranging from the Social Insurance Fund at one level to the National Asset Management Agency and third-level institutions including the University of Limerick and Trinity College Dublin at another. It is a heavy workload, one which the office’s 135-strong workforce is hoping to make easier through the recruitment of additional employees. “It should be up to 160,” McCarthy says of the office’s workforce, adding that it currently has several vacancies for which it is recruiting. Recruitment, however, isn’t necessarily the problem. “It’s retention,” McCarthy says. Indeed, just in the line of sight of the organisation’s swish new offices on Upper Mayor Street is Big 4 firm, PwC. It is a hazard of the public sector that, lured by higher salaries and job opportunities elsewhere, some recruits don’t hang around for long. “There are more opportunities as the economy has recovered,” McCarthy agrees, but he doesn’t downplay the opportunities that lie within the office too. “One thing that does strike me is that when people join us, they find out how interesting the work is and how real it is, and how it has a material impact on people’s lives,” he says. A career public servant himself, McCarthy has never been lured by the bright lights of the private sector. An economist by training, he joined the Department of Finance in 1981, where he worked until 1994 carrying out economic and demographic analysis and policy and programme evaluation work. From there, he moved to the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General where he served as deputy director, and then director of audit, before assuming the top job in May 2012. Key objectives Already au fait with the workings of the office when he assumed the top job, McCarthy has been keen to continue the process of development. “I would have been reasonably aware of what the job was, so there were no particular surprises,” he says. But he also has some specific goals in mind. Bringing forward the timeliness of financial reporting is one of these. While McCarthy concedes that public sector financial reporting is “not as fast as the stock exchange might require”, it has improved somewhat, as shown in a report from his office. And he has ambitions for the scope of the work the office can do. “I’d like to expand it. We can do more work; we haven’t been doing as much reporting work as we’d like”. But what does he have in mind? One area McCarthy thinks the office should look at is broadening the ‘follow the money’ principle. “There are particular constraints about carrying out inspection work. We are limited to certain bodies, but the principle applied in other jurisdictions is following the money to the point it is used,” he says. The office has also focused on improving the accountability of public bodies. It is not just auditing that the office focuses on; it also tries to work on other areas. For example, a 2014 report on the operation of audit committees included a selfassessment checklist which the committees could use themselves. The office also prepared a similar guide on severance payments, with an emphasis on managing the payments. “That sort of output is valuable,” says McCarthy. www.accountancyireland.ie
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