What is going on in the Department of public expenditure? More aptly, should we be calling it the Department of public mis-expenditure at this stage? That is what we all want to know, because the Department is in charge of tens of billions of euro and now we learn that its own HR agency cannot do its sums right. Senior civil servants and Ministers, current and former, were overpaid huge sums of money. We are told that one retired civil servant owes €280,000 because their pension was undertaxed. How can the Department have allowed this to happen? What does it say about the control and oversight systems in place? A total of 13,000 people are now being assessed. Will it end there or is this scandal expected to grow? Was the assessment that was brought before Cabinet yesterday conclusive? How much money are we talking about and how can the Taoiseach have confidence in the controls in the Department?

It is a very serious issue. The National Shared Services Office, NSSO, is responsible for payroll for civil servants and officeholders. The Minister has commissioned an external audit to go into the NSSO to examine in a much more comprehensive, forensic and detailed way the issues that have arisen. There needs to be further validation of what has emerged, particularly in terms of the 13,000 civil servants, and to see if there are other issues that need to be dealt with. That external audit needs to happen and we need to see the results of that.