FAS paid €1.3m to training firm that falsified its student numbers
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A COMPUTER-TRAINING company that falsified the number of people on its courses was paid almost €1.3m by the state agency FAS.
The midlands-based company -- which was named in the Dail yesterday as Foras Training -- claimed for people whom it had not trained.
It also had only one properly registered trainer out of 25 for courses that it delivered on behalf of FAS. The company printed its own training certificates, instead of registering them with a certifying body.
The Dail's Public Accounts Committee heard yesterday that Foras Training had to repay €7,400 to FAS after the irregularities had been uncovered in an internal audit by the state training agency.
FAS assistant director general Martin Lynch said the company had been suspended from the training register as a result.
"In retrospect, it might have been appropriate, but it wasn't referred to the gardai," he said.
Foras Training is run by Michael and Lisa O'Connell of Marlinstown, Mullingar, Co Westmeath. Ms O'Connell told the Irish Independent that the company was still trading and had not been suspended from the training register.
Foras Training received almost €1.3m from the FAS Competency Development Programme (CDP), which paid out €167m to employers to upskill staff between 2003 and 2009.
FAS never recorded how many of the 123,000 workers trained in the programme actually gained a certificate.
Only half of the courses were inspected and just 25pc of the workers checked were found to be "low-skilled", even though all the courses were meant to be targeted at this group.
Slush fund
Labour TD Roisin Shorthall said she believed the CDP programme was a giant slush fund used for "divvying out" money to the employers' bodies and trade unions that were part of the social-partnership process.
She said the FAS sub-committee which approved the organisations to carry out the training was comprised of members of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), employers' body IBEC and others.
"All were associated with bodies that benefited from the allocation of these funds," she said.
Ms Shorthall accused the Department of Enterprise of suppressing a report into the CDP programme.
It took five years to finish -- leading to the resignation of a senior civil servant in protest at the delay. Committee members praised this civil servant, Pat Hayden, for "putting his career on the line" and said he had been "vindicated".
The department's secretary general, Sean Gorman, who previously served as a board member of FAS, said: "I'm absolutely satisfied there was no attempt to cover or suppress anything -- on the contrary."
The State is expected to be able to claim back around €56m from the European Social Fund towards the €167m cost of the CDP programme.
It has now been shut down because FAS is concentrating its resources on retraining the growing numbers of unemployed people.
The committee also heard that FAS would not be able to recover the €120,000 it had sought from another firm, which had been found to have changed assessment results so that its students could pass exams.
FAS director general Paul O'Toole said Ashfield Computer Training has gone into liquidation and the advice was that money could not be recovered.
- Michael Brennan Political Correspondent
Irish Independent
