Stormont’s Department of Finance (DoF) failed to give government auditors “timely access to adequate records” that would support the claim that civil servants are implementing a raft of recommendations made by the RHI Inquiry.
The department leading the rolling oversight review in the wake of the scandal that saw devolution suspended for three years has also declined to commit to carrying out an audit of record keeping, as advocated in the report from the £13m inquiry, chaired by Sir Patrick Coughlin.
Friction between senior DoF staff and their colleagues at the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) is laid bare in the latter’s latest progress report on the implementation of 42 governance recommendations made by the RHI Inquiry in 2020.
The watchdog found that record keeping procedures had “regressed slightly” since it last examined post-RHI governance two years ago.
In the latest report belatedly published on Tuesday, Auditor General Dorrina Carville takes the unusual step of highlighting the problems encountered by her staff as they sought to assess progress made by civil servants in implementing the RHI Inquiry panel’s recommendations.
She draws attention to “the fact that my audit team encountered difficulty in securing timely access to adequate records”.
The auditor general says DoF published a progress report in March this year but when her officials asked for information to corroborate its own assessment none was immediately forthcoming. It led to a delay in the report’s publication of more than three months.
The auditors say they “do not concur with the degree of progress” claimed by DoF in its own report.
Elsewhere, the Audit Office report identifies sluggish implementation of the RHI Inquiry’s 42 recommendations.
It concludes that civil servants across departments “have undoubtedly made progress” since auditors last assessed progress in 2022 but that “the overall pace of implementation has been slow”.
Four and a half years since the inquiry’s recommendations were published, 16 have still not been fully implemented.
The auditors’ report concludes that five planned actions by Stormont department’s in response to the 2020 recommendations are “unlikely to fully address the inquiry’s concerns”.
The report highlights two areas where in the past two years work has “regressed” and reveals that an executive sub-committee established to oversee the governance review last met in December 2020.
Ms Carville described the lack of progress in implementation as “concerning”.
“The inquiry’s findings demonstrated the significant learning and improvement that was needed from the NI Civil Service to rebuild public confidence,” the auditor general said.
“Four years on, a significant number of recommendations have yet to be fully implemented and, in our assessment, several are unlikely to be properly addressed by the actions currently planned.”
Opposition leader Matthew O’Toole said it was “remarkable” that the executive sub-committee had not met for four years.
“It is hard to avoid the conclusion that certain vested interests have been happy to simply revert to type rather grasp the fundamental reform called for in the Coughlin inquiry,” he said.
“Any delay in providing vital information to the Audit Office is deeply concerning. Given the economic scale and political consequences of the RHI fiasco, and the cross-party commitment to proceed with the findings of the RHI inquiry, it is unacceptable that there should be any impediment to the Audit Office scrutinising the delivery of inquiry recommendations.”
