Don’t mess with the Eliot Ness of the HSE
IF you are up to anything in the HSE, whether it’s topups, perks or luxury travel paid for by public funds, there is one woman you really, really don’t want on your case.
Her name probably won’t mean much to most folk, but you can bet it strikes fear into every health service manager or charity boss who has ever signed off on an unauthorised payment, topped up fat salaries, or treated themselves to a lavish five-star meal at the taxpayers’ expense – and, thanks to this woman, we’ve discovered this sort of thing happens quite a bit.
She’s Dr Geraldine Smith; she’s the Eliot Ness of the HSE. Hers is the name that crops up in just about every exposé of taxpayer funds being squandered, wasted, misdirected or mis-spent over the past ten years at least.
With a half-dozen more Dr Geraldine Smiths patrolling the use of taxpayers’ money in every sector that receives even a cent in Exchequer funds, we’d be out of debt in jig time.
She was the HSE auditor who wrote a damning report into Holles Street hospital, including an unauthorised €40,000 payment to Master Rhona Mahony, this week found to have violated public pay policy.
Despite being rebuffed repeatedly by Holles Street – by the very personnel who will be running the new National Maternity Hospital – and refused documentation she requested on the basis that it was none of her business, Dr Smith found potential conflicts of interest, ‘undocumented arrangements’ and breaches of public pay regulations.
But then, Dr Mahony is just the latest high-flier to discover that the more there are attempts to tell Dr Smith to mind her own beeswax, the more dogged she becomes – and that resistance is ultimately futile.
Back in 2009, for example, she began writing to Siptu querying the use of €250,000 of HSE funds annually earmarked for a health service training programme called Skill.
Her final audit concluded that the money had gone on 31 foreign trips – the head of Skill visited the US, Hong Kong and Australia among his 22 jaunts – along with other outgoings such as €30,000 spent on laptops for union members.
Because the money was under the control of the union rather than the HSE, Dr Smith, who has said she likes to carry out her investigations ‘under the radar’, told the Public Accounts Committee that she had pursued it by ‘other methods’.
It was she who revealed, back in 2013, that 29 hospital managers had their pension funds topped up out of public funds to the tune of €1million in three years.
It was her audit of the Central Remedial Clinic, among other agencies and hospitals, that led to the revelations about CEO Paul Kiely’s €740,000 retirement package, and raised questions about payments to senior managers in Rehab.
Dr Smith also headed the audit of the suicide charity Console, in 2015, which met with ‘considerable resistance’ from the CEO Paul Kelly, and for good reason: she discovered that he and his wife Patricia, another director, had been living it up at Console’s expense, spending over €1million on foreign holidays, expensive cars, top restaurants and designer clothes.
MOST recently, Dr Smith led the audit into St John of God, following a whistleblower’s tip-off to the Irish Mail on Sunday in June of 2013. It had been among a number of Section 38 bodies – those that are funded to provide a defined level of service on behalf of the HSE – given an ‘amnesty’ to sort out issues with topups and allowances, following an earlier audit.
But even though the charity told her that it was in compliance, by November of that year, instead it had put in place a scheme designed to circumvent the rules.
Even she was shocked by the duplicity in St John of God, she said.
And by the complexity of the schemes set up – they would not have been obvious to anyone inspecting their accounts, she said, and it was only by ‘detailed analysis and interrogation’ that she uncovered the extent to which she had been ‘misled’.
Given the lengths some have gone to throw her off the scent, she has admitted that it’s difficult to know, just by looking at their accounts, exactly how many other Section 38 bodies might not be in compliance.
However, anyone who is fiddling their books would be very foolish indeed to take much comfort from that, at least not once Dr Smith gets wind of their behaviour. So my advice is simple. If you ever find out that Dr Geraldine Smith is auditing you, come out with your hands up – and your ledgers open. It’ll save everybody time...