This story was first published in the Irish Mail on Sunday on 11/09/2011
By: Michael O’Farrell
Investigations Editor
THE Irish Mail on Sunday today reveals how a high-profile TD has been allowed to make a string of bogus expenses claims – even though the Dáil authorities have been repeatedly told that they are based on fake invoices.
Kieran Coughlan, who is Clerk of the Dáil, was made aware last year that the Fianna Fáil TD Ned O’Keeffe, who has since retired, had made three bogus claims for mobile phone expenses totalling thousands of euro.
Mr Coughlan is the most powerful civil servant in the Oireachtas: he is responsible for all its staff – and for the office which approves TDs’ expenses.
However, Mr Coughlan never instigated any probe into Deputy O’Keeffe’s bogus claims – or why staff working for him had paid sums to the Deputy on the basis of fake invoices.
Eventually, a concerned member of the public, John Mulligan, wrote letters to Mr Coughlan complaining about one of the expenses claims.
No investigation was ever launched, however, as the complaints were never brought to the attention of TDs on the committee which investigates such cases.
Instead, Mr Coughlan allowed Deputy O’Keeffe to resubmit fresh paperwork correcting the information in the disputed invoice – and has since insisted that the bogus claim was ‘properly made’.
Mr Coughlan also repeatedly wrote to Mr Mulligan challenging the basis of his complaint, wrongly stating that it was based on inaccurate material.
At one point, disheartened at what he felt was the ‘stonewalling’ of his complaint, Mr Mulligan reluctantly agreed to withdraw it – though he quickly changed his mind. Exchanges between the men went on until February, when the Dáil was dissolved for the election.
As a result, Deputy O’Keeffe, who retired from his Cork East seat, could not be investigated by the Oireachtas.
While Mr Mulligan feels that his complaints were ‘stonewalled’, Mr Coughlan defended his actions and insisted that he abided by parliamentary procedures and the law.
He also argues that Mr Mulligan’s complaint was withdrawn, which is why he never passed it on for investigation. But as recently as this weekend, he has declined to answer specific questions about what he did when he first became aware of the bogus invoices submitted by Deputy O’Keeffe.
In his only official comment to the MoS, on February 18, 2011, Mr Coughlan said the Ethics in Public Office Act set out a ‘procedure for the investigation of complaints’ which precluded him from commenting.
‘It is not appropriate to discuss details of any complaint or to provide you with information relating to the subject matter of such complaint,’ he said, as he insisted he had acted appropriately.
Mr Mulligan, however, is adamant that he was defeated by bureaucracy. While stating that Mr Coughlan ‘did everything by the book’, he also characterised the Clerk of the Dáil’s response as ‘a closing of ranks against any criticism or the airing of any notion of wrongdoing.’
He said a key claim made repeatedly by Mr Coughlan was ‘not factual or correct’, adding, ‘My concerns were not addressed but were dealt with by a stonewalling process that seems endemic within the Dáil.
‘This matter should have been investigated thoroughly without the closing of ranks that seems to have taken place,’ he said.
Mr Mulligan hit the headlines in 2010 when he contacted gardaà after reading MoS reports that Dublin senator Ivor Callely had claimed €81,000 in travel expenses.
Following the failure of the Dáil to investigate the O’Keeffe claims, the MoS now plans to report details to gardaÃ.
Three bogus invoices. Four complaints in writing. And yet Dáil boss insists he had no power to act
Oireachtas secretary-general insists the fake phone receipts are genuine – and that the lack of ANY investigation is not his fault Complaints about bogus claims ‘stonewalled by the authorities’
By: Michael O’Farrell
IT was a revelation that should, at the very least, have sparked an immediate and thorough investigation by the authorities in Dáil Éireann.
But on Sunday, October 17, 2010 when the Mail on Sunday revealed that a sitting TD – Ned O’Keeffe – had submitted bogus invoices to claim thousands of euro in expenses, the reaction of those responsible for policing the Dáil was decidedly muted.
The MoS story demonstrated that three invoices submitted by Deputy O’Keeffe – for a combined sum of €1,989.53 in car phone equipment – could not have been genuine.
The revelations came just months after this paper revealed Ivor Callely’s bogus mobile phone claims – which quickly became the subject of a major Oireachtas probe.
However, in the following days and weeks, the Oireachtas failed to announce an investigation of any kind into Deputy O’Keeffe. Indeed, there is no evidence that the man who is in overall charge of the Dáil expenses system – Kieran Coughlan, Secretary General of the Houses of the Oireachtas Service – took any action to investigate the allegations made by the MoS.
This inaction came despite the clear suggestion that the Oireachtas may have been defrauded. Moreover, this was now the second example of Oireachtas staff accepting fake mobile phone invoices as genuine. Yet their boss Mr Coughlan appears not to have intervened.
Concerned by this apparent inaction, a member of the public, John Mulligan, lodged a formal written complaint with the Oireachtas on November 10, 2010. Mr Mulligan felt sure that he knew what he was doing and he was confident that those responsible for upholding ethics laws would investigate his complaint. After all, he had already successfully made a previous complaint about Ivor Callely to the Clerk of the Seanad without any trouble whatsoever.
This time, however, the complaint was against a TD, not a senator, and so had to be made to the Clerk of the Dáil. And the current Clerk of the Dáil is none other than Kieran Coughlan – the same man who had failed to order any investigation into the wrongful expenses payouts by Oireachtas staff.
The law for both Clerks, however, is the same. It says that once they receive a written complaint, they have two choices.
The first is to pass the complaint on to the relevant Oireachtas committee for investigation. (This is what had happened to the complaint against Senator Callely: within 48 hours, and without any fuss, it was passed to the Committee and formally investigated.) The other choice for the Clerks when they receive a complaint is to decide that the complaint is vexatious, or frivolous, or lacking prima facie evidence: in such a case, the Clerk can reject it. However, critically, if the Clerk rejects a complaint, he must tell everyone concerned that he has done so.
Yet when Clerk of the Dáil Mr Coughlan received Mr Mulligan’s first letter of complaint, he took neither course of action. Instead, he took a contentious third option.
Rather than receiving an acknowledgement confirming that his complaint had been sent for investigation as he expected, Mr Mulligan was surprised to receive a lengthy and complex letter, making a string of pronouncements about the nature of the legislation and telling him that his complaint must be more detailed. He was also shocked to be told that he had to ‘specify the alleged contravention of the provision of the 1995 Act (as amended by the Act of 2001) in respect of the subject matter of the complaint and set out the basis for alleging that contravention’ – along with a suggestion that he seek the text of the Act on the internet.
Many citizens might have been put off at being told that, in order to report an alleged crime, they have to quote chapter and verse of the legislation which they believe has been broken. However, Mr Mulligan was not deterred.
The following day, November 13, he tried again, redrafting his complaint as requested. He also made it more detailed, focusing it on one of the three questionable invoices.
‘I would ask you to take the appropriate action to have this matter investigated by the relevant Dáil Committee,’ he wrote. It seemed a simple request: all the Clerk of the Dáil had to do was what the Clerk of the Seanad had done, by passing the letter on for investigation.
Once again, the Clerk of the Dáil did not do so. Instead, Mr Coughlan contacted Deputy O’Keeffe to tell him that a complaint had been made against him (an action which is not set out in the legislation, although Mr Coughlan later said he was acting in the interests of ‘natural justice’). Having been informed that a complaint was being pursued, Deputy O’Keeffe submitted new documentation in an attempt to justify the bogus invoice.
This documentation – a letter saying a clerical error had been made – was immediately accepted by the same Oireachtas authorities who work for Mr Coughlan… and who had declared Deputy O’Keeffe’s expenses legitimate the first time round.
The Oireachtas never asked for and never received any proof – such as bank records – from Deputy O’Keeffe that he had actually made a payment prior to claiming money back from the Oireachtas.
Nor did the Oireachtas seek or receive a copy of the suppliers’ accounts showing such an amount being received from Deputy O’Keeffe.
Only after Deputy O’Keeffe submitted this new documentation and had his expenses declared legitimate did Mr Coughlan finally act on Mr Mulligan’s complaint.
And once again he ignored the two options available to him under the Act and took a third option.
On December 21, more than five weeks after he had received the complaint, Mr Coughlan wrote to Mr Mulligan to inform him that Oireachtas staff had ‘confirmed that the claim and payments made by and to the Deputy are within the ambit’ of the Oireachtas scheme for TDs’ phone allowances.
Mr Coughlan’s letter also made the entirely untrue claim that the ‘information contained in the MoS’s article is not factual or correct’.
‘As your complaint is based on this article, you might please advise if you now wish to proceed with your complaint,’ he said.
Mr Mulligan was stumped. Here was the Clerk of the Dáil telling him categorically that Deputy O’Keeffe’s claim was ‘within the ambit of the scheme’… and that the MoS claims were wrong.
With reluctance – and only on the basis that he had been informed wrongly that the MoS article was incorrect – Mr Mulligan backed off. ‘There seems to be no point in proceeding further,’ he wrote to Mr Coughlan the following day.
But a few weeks later Mr Mulligan became convinced that what he was being told by the Oireachtas could not be correct. So on January 14 he complained again.
His letter asks Mr Coughlan ‘to have a further look at the complaint I made in respect of Deputy Ned O’Keeffe’s expenses claim’.
Once again, Mr Coughlan received the complaint; once again, however, he did not follow one of the two courses of action set out under the Act. Instead, he wrote another letter telling Mr Mulligan that Deputy O’Keeffe had done nothing wrong.
The Clerk of the Dáil repeated the earlier statement that the complaint had been based on ‘a media article which was not factually correct’. And despite having been asked to ‘have a further look at the complaint’, he instead signed off by saying that he was going to treat Mr Mulligan’s latest letter as ‘an administrative matter’.
By now, Mr Mulligan was sick of being told that an expenses payout based on a bogus invoice could possibly be legitimate.
On February 24, he made a fourth and final attempt to lodge a formal complaint. ‘I want to re-submit the original complaint,’ he wrote.
‘The full picture can only be established by having a member of the Garda SÃochána or some other such independent person examine Deputy O’Keeffe’s car to establish exactly what equipment was fitted above and beyond the manufacture’s equipment.
‘This is the only starting point for any inquiry that can clear Deputy O’Keeffe of the allegations that were made about him.’
The reply, On March 11, 2011, saw Mr Coughlan defend his actions again. ‘I had no option but to treat your earlier correspondence of 14 January on an administrative basis,’ he wrote adding that ‘it is important that the statutory requirements are complied within full when making a complaint.’
Mr Coughlan insisted that he could not have accepted Mr Mulligan’s January 14 request to ‘take a further look at the complaint’ because ‘that complaint had been withdrawn’.
And while Mr Coughlan would like to accept the latest letter, he said, he could not do so – because the Dáil had been dissolved and Deputy O’Keeffe was no longer a sitting TD. Under the Ethics Act a complaint cannot be made against a person who is no longer a member of the Dáil.
Mr Coughlan’s letter again states his contention that the O’Keeffe claim was ‘within the ambit’ of the relevant scheme.
‘There is no question that this expense claim remains “irregular” or that the matter was not followed up or considered properly by the Oireachtas Service,’ the letter reads. Mr Coughlan signs off by saying that while no further complaint can be made to the Oireachtas about Deputy O’Keeffe, Mr Mulligan is free to take ‘this matter further with An Garda SÃochána’.
Once again Mr Mulligan was left disappointed and it was clear that his efforts to have Deputy O’Keeffe investigated by the Oireachtas had been terminally frustrated.
‘The bottom line, from my standpoint as a taxpayer and a citizen, is that my concerns were not addressed but were dealt with by a stonewalling process that seems endemic within the office of the Dáil administration,’ he told the MoS.
‘It is now my view that I was to some extent defeated in my attempts to get to the truth of this matter by the entire system of clerking and bureaucracy that tends to tie up a lesser informed member of the public in red tape until such time as they go away.’
In February – and again this week – the MoS asked Mr Coughlan to answer questions about remaining inconsistencies in Deputy O’Keeffe’s expense claims and about the manner in which the Oireachtas had dealt with Mr Mulligan’s complaints.
Mr Coughlan did not answer any of the questions, indicating that he was forbidden by law from discussing any complaint that had been made to him. ‘Section 35 of the 1935 Act specifically precludes me and any person from doing so by making it a criminal offence for information obtained pursuant to the 1995 Act to be disclosed save in certain stated exceptions which are not relevant in this instance,’ he wrote.
Deputy O’Keeffe, who still stands accused of submitting bogus invoices to claim expenses, has never challenged the original MoS investigation; neither has the company whose name appears on the invoices in question.
Tomorrow the MoS will formally lodge a complaint with the Garda Fraud Squad and ask that a thorough investigation be carried out into the bogus invoices submitted to the Oireachtas by Deputy O’Keeffe.
The question as to why his bogus invoices were not investigated before, however, is one that only the Oireachtas and our elected representatives in it can answer.
I acted entirely within ethics of public off ice act, says Clerk
By: Michael O’Farrell
KIERAN COUGHLAN insists that, under the law, he cannot comment on his handling of John Mulligan’s complaints about Ned O’Keeffe’s expenses claims.
He has repeatedly insisted in correspondence that he acted entirely within the law and carried out his duties and responsibilities as Clerk of the Dáil.
He argues that he acted under the strict terms of the Ethics in Public Office Act in dealing with Mr Mulligan’s complaints.
Mr Coughlan’s first controversial action occurred around November 10/11 last year, when he did not pass Mr Mulligan’s initial letter of complaint to the Dáil Ethics Committee for investigation.
Rather than referring the letter to the committee, he wrote to Mr Mulligan asking him to quote the specific sections of the Ethics in Public Act under which he was making his complaint.
The act makes no mention of asking complainants such questions, and no such questions were asked of Mr Mulligan by the Clerk of the Seanad during a similar complaint. Nevertheless, Mr Coughlan insists that asking Mr Mulligan to quote the relevant legislation was simply a case of obtaining more detailed information, which is an important part of his function.
Mr Coughlan’s second controversial action came after Mr Mulligan complied with the clerk’s demand for more detail and wrote back quoting the specific sections of the act under which he was making his complaint.
This time, rather than passing on the complaint to the ethics committee for investigation, Mr Coughlan held on to the letter for five weeks. Meanwhile, Mr Coughlan contacted Deputy O’Keeffe, who was allowed to resubmit a revised claim stating that the false information on the original invoices was a ‘clerical error’.
Mr Coughlan said the act does not specify a timescale under which such a complaint should be referred to the committee, and that he was very busy with Dáil business.
He said that he had contacted Deputy O’Keeffe – even though such contact is not provided for under the act – because it is a requirement of natural justice that an accused man knows the details of the allegations made against him.
Mr Coughlan also repeatedly insisted that it is his view that the expenses claim made by Deputy O’Keeffe was legitimate and that there was ‘no bogus invoice’. Instead, he maintained the false information on the invoice was a ‘clerical error’ by TR Motors.
After the five-week delay, Mr Coughlan wrote to Mr Mulligan (again outside the provisions of the act) and insisted that the expenses claim was legitimate. As a result, Mr Mulligan agreed to let the matter drop.
On this basis, Mr Coughlan insisted that the reason that no investigation was pursued against Deputy O’Keeffe was that Mr Mulligan withdrew his complaint. Both Mr Mulligan and the MoS, however, have argued the complaint was only withdrawn because Mr Coughlan had wrongly stated that the expenses claim was legitimate.
Mr Coughlan’s third controversial action came when Mr Mulligan wrote to him in on January 14 to ask him to re-examine Deputy O’Keeffe’s expenses claim. Instead, Mr Coughlan repeated that the claim was legitimate and said that he was treating the request as an ‘administrative matter’.
He now says that he was not permitted by law to re-examine the original complaint – although there is once again nothing in the legislation that states this. He insists that he could only have acted on an entirely fresh complaint.
The clerk also insists that he pointed out that it was open to Mr Mulligan to make another complaint to him and to the Garda.
Unknown civil servant who runs Dáil like a well-oiled machine
By: Michael O’Farrell
HE IS virtually unknown to the public, but Kieran Coughlan is in many ways the most powerful man in Leinster House, controlling more than 400 staff and an annual budget in excess of €120m.
As Secretary General of the Houses of the Oireachtas and Clerk of the Dáil, Mr Coughlan’s role is closely intertwined with every TD and senator who has ever been elected in the past three decades.
He is the man who welcomes them all to Leinster House for the first time, typically with a working lunch in which he begins to show them the ropes.
Mr Coughlan, they quickly learn, is the man who is ultimately responsible for paying their wages and expenses.
He is also responsible for channelling public complaints about the ethical behaviour of those politicians to an internal investigation – or the dustbin.
He convenes each new Dáil for the first time and issues writs to each constituency officer instructing them to hold an election when a Dáil falls or is dissolved.
A stickler for the rules in the best tradition of the civil service, he is nevertheless renowned for gently enforcing the correct habits on those who may be unfamiliar with some of the protocols of national parliament in a manner which has won him many friends.
Evidence of his popularity can be seen in many lengthy tributes by members of the Seanad when he moved from his role as clerk of the lower house in 1990.
‘I would like to thank him for all his help to all Members in all parties over the years; for his great courtesy; for his even greater tact which, I am sure, at times was tested; for his fairness and, above all, for his integrity,’ then-Senator Maurice Manning told the House.
‘His ability to help new Members around the procedures and practices is by this stage almost legendary. He was always positive in his help to Members, old and new, and never intrusive,’ he continued.
Educated at Presentation Brothers College, Cork and UCC, Mr Coughlan entered public service in 1973 and, with nearly 40 years of service behind him, is close to retirement. He has served his entire career in Leinster House.
