VAT inspectors may have some explaining to do after the Auditor General revealed abuse ranging from hundreds of hours of questionable vacation and sick leave to what appeared to be forged signatures.
The National Audit Office probed the VAT Department last year, with the results of its investigation published in a stern public accounts audit report earlier his month. It found what it described as “a lack of internal controls where overtime payments and allowances granted to employees were either unauthorised, inadequately supported by evidence or incorrect”.
While testing one random employee’s vacation leave forms, the NAO uncovered “anomalies” with the managerial signatures. The same manager, the NAO said, appeared to have more than one signature.
“Upon clarification, the senior officer in charge confirmed that the signatures on both batches were his. However, this office has serious reservations regarding the veracity of these signatures,” the NAO said.
The bulk of the audit focused on leave and allowances.
One was paid some €2,000 in allowances for inspections which he never carried out
In a random selection of department employees’ vacation leave forms, it found 120 and 21 hours of two officers respectively, which were not supported by any authorisation application forms whatsoever.
Meanwhile, some 520 hours of vacation leave which had been authorised for other employees had incomplete attached documentation, with the approval date section mostly left blank.
The situation wasn’t much better when it came to sick leave.
VAT Department employees are to provide medical certificates when taking time off for being sick.
However, an analysis of all sickness absences taken by VAT officials in one year alone revealed 19 instances where leave was taken but not covered by the necessary medical certificates. The NAO noted that one officer failed to clock out on the majority of days throughout the year under review.
Similarly, testing revealed that another nine officers, seven of who performed VAT inspections, had regularly failed to clock out at the end of their working day. In the case of two of these officers, justification for not clocking out was provided but not corroborated by any supporting documentation.
The NAO said that a senior officer had verbally explained that the cases being questioned could have been related to duties carried out by inspectors outside VAT premises during office hours.
The NAO, however, wanted to look deeper into the matter. After auditing the documents filed by a sample of inspectors, it found 14 irregularities relating to three VAT inspectors. The NAO said it “could not trace any evidence relating to work carried out, since nothing was documented”.
A look at the duties performed by one VAT inspector found that he had been paid some €2,000 in allowances for inspections which he never carried out.
In its reply to the report, the department said it had been in the process of a merger with Customs and Inland Revenue Departments since 2014. As a result, its corporate structure was “somehow ambiguous”.