As part of its annual review of Government spending published last week, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) looked at the 326 accommodation centres the Government paid to house asylum seekers.
The State’s financial watchdog picked 20 properties that had agreements to provide accommodation. These ranged from hotels and apartment complexes to guest houses and dormitories. They were paid between €40 and €170 per person daily by the International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS).
The C&AG visited 12 of these and reviewed the files on the remainder and found the following:
Only one provider could provide proof they legally owned the building in question;
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Only nine of them had fire certificates, but none of the certificates reflected the proposed occupancy level;
Only eight had a certificate proving they had insurance;
Only four could provide evidence of having planning permission or a planning exemption;
The only thing all the providers (bar one) had in common was that they each had a Companies Registration Office number, presumably so they could get paid.
The failure of IPAS to ensure that accommodation being provided to asylum seekers met its own criteria should, of course, be seen in the context of the pressure on the system, which was and still is overwhelmed.
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By the end of last year, 3,825 single male applicants could not be housed and had to source their own accommodation as the State focused on housing women and families. It’s understandable if corners were cut in the name of expediency when agreeing emergency accommodation.
What is harder to understand is why matters were not tidied up later. On foot of the C&AG investigation IPAS sought the missing documentation. As of August this year, it had insurance certificates for 13 of the 20 properties, fire certificates for 15, evidence of property ownership for 10 of them and planning documentation for 10 of them.
But, as things stand, between a third and half of the accommodation providers in the sample still could not or would not produce evidence of compliance with fire safety, insurance and planning law.
That, in turn, speaks volumes about the Wild West nature of the asylum accommodation business, which has seen many fortunes made out of the despair and misery of others. The C&AG report also puts a figure on the fraud that seems almost endemic in the system.
The C&AG looked at 40 payments made to the sample 20 accommodation providers it focused on. It found multiple examples of money being paid for services that were not provided.
One of the providers was paid on the basis it had capacity for 97 residents, even though the number agreed with IPAS was 92, “indicating a potential overcharge of around €11,600 for February 2024”, the C&AG report said.
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Four payments charged IPAS for VAT totalling €884,000 even though the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers is VAT exempt.
Yet another charged VAT totalling €7.4 million between March 2022 and December 31st, 2023. They have repaid €1.5 million, and the Department of Justice told the C&AG that “recovery of the remaining VAT overcharge remains under review”.
The C&AG also found that IPAS was being charged by one provider for three rooms that were not being used to accommodate asylum seekers. It calculated this equated to “being overcharged by at least €15,000 each month”.
If the figures here are typical, then potential overpayments related to the State’s effort to deal with a humanitarian crisis could run into many millions of euro.
The Department of Justice – which took over responsibility for asylum accommodation from the Department of Children this year – told the C&AG that, as of late last August, its contracts team had identified seven cases of overcharging totalling almost €4.5 million.
Recoupment plans have been agreed with five, but the State’s ability to recover all this money has to be in doubt. The C&AG points out that IPAS did not check the financial stability of accommodation providers before reaching agreement with them. In other words, there might not be anyone to sue if things go south.
You would have to take a very generous view of human nature to avoid the conclusion that a small group of individuals saw the State’s effort to face up to its responsibility during a humanitarian crisis as just another opportunity to line their pockets.
Many of them would appear to still do so. Since last April, IPAS has put a process in place to track contract breaches by accommodation providers.
It found that, as of June, 80 providers were in breach of their contract – most for not having all the beds they were contracted to provide available.
