White collar crime unit’s job hunt fiasco

Chaos led to three-year wait for roles to be filled

HIRING six senior accountants for the State’s white-collar crime unit took almost three years amid chaos over getting the jobs approved and advertised.

The process of hiring the new accountants for the Office of Director of Corporate Enforcement became so convoluted that ODCE boss Ian Drennan described it as ‘nothing short of a disgrace’.

The saga caused major discord within the office and the Department of Jobs and Enterprise, records released under Freedom of Information have revealed.

The ODCE first came looking for the posts in April 2013. There was public disquiet at the time because the office only had a single accountant available while dealing with major inquiries. However, sanction from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform still hadn’t been received by February 2014.

An email between civil servants in the Department of Jobs said: ‘I consider that the delay by DPER in responding to requests for sanction is not acceptable. Enforcement bodies such as the ODCE... should not be starved of key skills which they have identified are necessary to enable them to fulfil their statutory mandates.’

The email suggested the matter needed to be escalated and that the then Jobs Minister Richard Bruton would contact the then Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin directly. In June 2014, a letter from Mr Bruton was finally sent to the Department of Public Expenditure pleading the case for the extra accountants.

Sanction was not granted until October of that year, however, at which point the Department of Jobs began the process of getting the job hunt started.

At a July 2015 meeting between the Department of Jobs and the ODCE, the latter pleaded for the process to be speeded up and asked that the jobs be advertised the following month.

By September, still nothing had happened and Mr Drennan wrote directly to the department saying he was ‘anxious to progress this matter’. In late November, the text of an advertisement for the jobs was circulated but was, according to the records, seriously problematic.

One internal email said: ‘It would be an embarrassment to the department if it were to be published as drafted.’

Mr Drennan was furious and in an email said: ‘The manner in which this has been dealt with is nothing short of a disgrace.’

In another, he said the advert made no sense and ‘reads as though it was drafted by a child’. The advert – with some of the mistakes corrected – did eventually appear and 46 people applied for the posts.

However, interviews were delayed due to difficulties getting a fraud expert for the panel. In March last year, the appointments finally went ahead.

In a statement regarding the saga, the Department of Jobs said: ‘The challenges inherent in the recruitment of specialist staff resulted in delays recruiting these specialist staff once sanction had been secured.’

The ODCE said, in relation to the jobs saga, that these resources were part of the report submitted to Tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald in June after the botched Anglo trial. ‘As the report is a confidential document, the ODCE is not in a position to elaborate further on its contents,’ it added.

‘Nothing short of a disgrace’