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According to a report from the Comptroller and Auditor General, two employees of a subsidiary of the University of Limerick have collected additional pension benefits worth 1.2 million euros. after being admitted to a university pension plan about to get closer to newcomers.
The report deals with compensation processing, including pension provisions and severance pay, for some executives at Limerick University and the Sligo Institute of Technology.
It found that under an agreement reached at the end of 2012, the two officers employed by the subsidiary had been admitted to a defined benefit pension plan that was about to get closer to the newcomers.
According to C & AG, third-level institutions typically use subsidiaries to manage non-core functions in order to separate their business operations from those of the institution.
He says that this allows non-essential functions to be performed on commercial lines, with employees of their subsidiaries being paid on competitive terms in the market, with pension rights based on less generous defined contributions.
The university justified the admission of the executives to the defined benefit plan, stating that they had been promised pension benefits equivalent to those of employees recruited in the university.
However, according to the C & AG, there was no documentation on this subject.
The supplementary pension benefits resulting from the admission to the defined benefit plan financed by the Exchequer were actuarially valued at € 1.2 million.
The C & AG also reviewed the award of "Professional Extra Years" for retirement at UL.
It notes that some public sector pension plans provide in exceptional circumstances for the discretionary granting of additional professional years to compensate for cases where certain professional or technical staff can not claim a full pension based on 40 years of service prior to the age of mandatory retirement.
He added that the added professional years are a form of remuneration for which a sanction would normally be required.
Historically, the allocation of additional years of professional retirement activity in five of the seven universities is approved on a case-by-case basis by the Department of Education and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.
However, until last April, UL and the University of Dublin City had set up their own separate framework for the award of additional years.
After reviewing the awards from the professional years added in DCU and UL between 2012 and 2016, the C & AG found that UL granted such benefits to its employees more generously than DCU.
While DCU limited the allocations to academic staff, 18% of UL awards were awarded to non-academic staff or management.
The report indicates that since April, DCU and UL will have to apply for authorization to grant additional years to the Pension Unit of the Department of Education and Skills.
UL's treatment of two redundancies in 2012 is also criticized. The report indicates that at the time, the university had misrepresented the circumstances surrounding the layoff agreements with C & AG and at a hearing of the public accounts committee of 39; Oireachtas.
In particular, the university did not disclose that it had entered into three-year consulting contracts with the two directors at the same time that the severance contracts had been concluded.
The report states: "Compared to what the two executives would have received had they kept their jobs until the minimum age of retirement, the combined termination / counseling benefits put in place have resulted in additional costs for the University of Limerick (including recurrent pension payments) estimated at € 310,000 in net present value ".
Finally, the report notes that a termination indemnity of 2016 at the Institute of Technology Sligo "significantly exceeded" the penalty imposed by the Ministry of Education and Skills, taking into account An amount wrongly clbadified as a payment related to a sabbatical leave.
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