Latest Expert Witness News

Wright says Ireland needs more economic, tax and financial experts

The Wright Report “Strengthening the capacity of the Department of Finance” comes to a number of damning conclusions regarding people and levels of expertise.

The Department does not have critical mass in areas where technical economic skills are required….it has too many generalists in positions requiring technical economic and other skills.

To strengthen the core Finance structure, Wright offers a set of recommendations to modernise management, reform existing organisation structures and add substantially more people with technical economic and other skills. The following is a selection of these recommendations.

The Department must find a way to increase substantially the numbers of economists and other staff with relevant technical qualifications.

The Department needs to increase substantially its numbers of economists trained to Masters level or higher and add other technical capacity, especially accounting, banking and financial markets expertise.

The Department should organise itself to consult with tax and financial experts and prepare advice that is most appropriate to an efficient tax regime for Ireland.

The Panel strongly supports the creation of a Private Sector Advisory Board which it understands is under consideration by the Departments of the Taoiseach and Finance.

A full-time Task Force should be established and assigned responsibility for driving forward the reforms under the Croke Park Agreement.

In addition, there is a need to recruit expertise in the areas of change management and business process re-engineering.



The full review is available here.

http://www.finance.gov.ie/viewdoc.asp?DocID=6707

back