It took seven years for the Department of Agriculture to put 50 deployed staff from the Cork and Dublin Milk Boards into gainful employment, a press conference was told yesterday.
Michael Noonan, chairman of the Dáil Éireann Committee of Public Accounts, said that because of various issues, including redundancy payments, the State had lost €1.7 million in sale of the boards in the 1990s.
Publishing the interim report on the 2003 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General covering PAC hearings from October 2004-July 2005, Mr Noonan said the department was now in a position where 400 staff were surplus to requirement.
This was because of dramatic changes in the Common Agricultural Policy where there were fewer inspections and farm schemes to be administered. "The committee has recommended that efficient methods of redeploying surplus staff should be adopted in order to eliminate the incidence of staff being paid for doing no work," he said.
"In essence that is what happened in the milk board case and it happened before when the old Land Commission was closed down and staff were transferred to the Department of Agriculture," he said.
Mr Noonan said that the department should ensure, prior to decentralisation, that key resource and skill levels were maintained in all sections that relocate.
"We want to ensure that when there is redeployment and decentralisation, that staff of all levels are redeployed," he said.
He said the refusal of senior staff to locate in the forestry offices in Wexford had damaged the implementation of the National Forestry Plan. The report also dealt with the way the department had opened "escrow" accounts in 2003 to pay for the storage of meat and bonemeal throughout the State which meant it did not have to surrender unused money at the end of the financial year.
"While there was no money lost to the taxpayers, these financial arrangements were not appropriate because there was no transparency or accountability involved. That was no way to do Government business," he said.
The report recommended the Department of Finance review and update the references in the public financial procedures to the use of escrow agreements in order to avoid any possibility of their use to avoid a surrender of funds.
The committee also recommended a tightening up of the audit controls in Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority where a false travel claim case had been uncovered in 2003.