THE STATE training agency Fás has said the bulk of trainees who had certificates withheld several weeks ago pending a national audit are now receiving them.
However, Fás director general Paul O’Toole told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills yesterday there were still concerns about 100 certificates.
However, in a statement issued after the meeting, Fás said that the actual number of certificates which were of concern stood at 190. It said it had undertaken a “look back” exercise on certification requests.
In November the body charged with developing awards in the further education sector, Fetac, suspended certification of Fás courses after an investigation which followed the discovery of irregularities in the northeast.
At the time around 13,000 certificates were affected by the move.
Mr O’Toole said the Fetac investigation, which followed visits to all 17 Fás centres, had found that its systems were “cumbersome and vulnerable”.
He said the systems were open to human error which would not necessarily be caught by a computer check at a later stage and could “open up the possibility that a particular certificate could be wrongly applied for”.
The Fetac report on its investigation, which is to be published next month, is understood to have found “systemic errors” in relation to the trail leading from e-recording and transcribing course outcomes to the input of the data on the computer system.
