Diversity

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.
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