By: Michael O’Farrell
A SOCIAL housing charity chief who tried to keep a London council house years after moving back to Ireland for full-time work has quit this week.
This action by Adrienne Smith, vice chair of the taxpayer-funded Irish charity North & East Housing Association, meant the low-cost London home she occupied could not be given to a family in need.
Her resignation comes after the Irish Mail on Sunday asked her a number of questions about her London home. Last night, she told the MOS: ‘My resignation was for personal reasons unrelated to housing.’ The MOS has separately put a series of questions to the charity about various expenditures in recent years.
Until she quit on Monday, Ms Smith – who has owned a home in Ireland since 1991 – was a long-time board member of the charity that manages a €20m housing stock for those in need in Dublin, Meath and Louth.
She was also the chair of the charity’s risk, audit and governance committee.
Meanwhile, an MOS investigation, sparked by a protected disclosure whistleblower at the charity, has revealed a number of concerns on financial governance at the NEHA in the past, including:
Expenses that have been paid back by Ms Smith;
- Tens of thousands in taxpayer funds spent in restaurants and hotels by a previous board;
- The treatment of a whistleblower who tried to raise concerns about the way accounts had been presented.
Our investigation resulted in Ms Smith refunding €1,350 in mobile phone expenses and returning an iPad, pending a review by the charity into whether further amounts should be paid back.
Despite this, the NEHA has said it is ‘not aware of any evidence that there was anything inappropriate about these expenses’. The association told the MoS it ‘understands that expenses claimed by Ms Smith were correctly claimed in line with established practices and procedures of the board at the relevant time’. Ms Smith changed her name from Adrian by deed poll in 2012; and her house in Ireland, that she bought in 1990, is still under that name.
Meanwhile, in a statement to the MoS, the State’s financial watchdog – the Comptroller and Auditor General – said it has been made aware of concerns at the charity. It said it is considering the possibility of a public investigation into how State funds allocated to housing bodies like the NEHA are monitored.
The charity has also appointed an auditing firm to examine whistleblower claims that almost €50,000 in expenses for a previous board were covered up when the manner in which accounts are presented was changed after 2013.
Though comparable charitable boards typically run up very little in expenses, four of the seven board members at the NEHA in 2013 – including Ms Smith and current chair Pat Lennon – each received thousands in travel and subsistence payments. For example treasurer Jim Byrne, who died last year, received €9,140 in mileage and subsistence in 2013, much of it for backdated claims from the previous two years.
In contrast, the expense bill of the entire 14-member board of a similar but larger housing charity, Clúid Housing, was €2,150, just €153 per director in that year.
One 2013 expenses claim, paid to Ms Smith – €2,170.65 for flights and car rentals to attend board meetings travelling from London – was inadvertently claimed and paid out twice in consecutive years.
The NEHA told the MoS the money was returned when the error was spotted. On top of travel and subsistence expenses paid directly to board members, the directors in place at the time ran up other expenses amounting to tens of thousands of euro between 2010 and 2014 – much of them in hotel and restaurant bills.
Though the charity is based in Blanchardstown, west Dublin – and had a boardroom there – monthly board meetings were held at the Paramount Hotel in Temple Bar in the centre of Dublin city.
Afterwards some board members enjoyed meals in nearby restaurants which, in once case, appear to have cost as much as €600 a sitting. In 2012, the total cost for these meals after board meetings amounted to more than €3,500, according to NEHA records seen by the MoS.
In April 2014, this expenditure was questioned when Chris White, then-CEO of governance charity Boardmatch Ireland, which was asked to source independent directors for the board of the NEHA. He declined, saying the expenses at the charity appeared ‘very high’.
‘My concern at the moment is if Boardmatch places a director onto the board and the issues of the North & East expenses come into the public domain then it will be damaging for them,’ he wrote in an email at the time.
After this criticism, the NEHA hired a new CEO, Vincent Keenan, who started in September 2014. He is also a board member of The Wheel, a charity that seeks to promote good governance in the not-for-profit sector.
After the Boardmatch rebuke, the NEHA changed the way expenses are presented in management accounts. This was done by reallocating much of the €46,000 board expenses listed in the original 2013 accounts to other categories.
The re-designation reduced the €46,000 figure, which Boardmatch criticised, to just €4,680, something the whistleblower has alleged is a cover-up. ‘It is my reasonable belief that a system for concealment of board expenses has now been established,’ the whistleblower’s disclosure to the C&AG reads.
Responding to MoS questions, the NEHA rejected any allegation that it had covered up expenses, saying any changes made were implemented to make the accounts more transparent on the recommendation of a financial consultant. In a statement to the MoS, the charity said the board accepted the ‘accounts historically prepared by the association were insufficiently transparent and grouped expenses together in a way that was not sufficiently clear’.
It said: ‘That is why accounting practices have been improved to provide a more accurate and transparent record of the finances of the association. It improves the clarity and accuracy of the accounts compared to the system which had run until 2013.’ The NEHA also said it had grown from an organisation set up by a group of friends decades ago into a ‘professional, substantial organisation’.
It stated: ‘As part of that journey, the association recognised that it needed to improve its governance procedures. NEHA and Boardmatch now work constructively together and the board has used the services of Boardmatch to recruit four new independent directors in the past two years.’ Boardmatch’s director Eva Gurn, told the MoS: ‘We can confirm that the North & East Housing Association sourced two directors through our free to use online matching service.
‘No candidates were specifically placed by Boardmatch Ireland onto the board of the North & East Housing Association nor were we engaged by the North & East Housing Association to conduct a bespoke search for candidate directors on their behalf.’
