Dental hospital spent more than €160k on sandwiches, pastries and coffees for staff meetings
File Dental Personalised Teas Employees Paid Ordering Picture Food, And And Cold Dublin Sandwiches In Advance Hospital Pastries, And Coffees, For Milk, With In Routinely Attendance Fruit, Hot Artisan
A Dublin dental training hospital spent more than €160,000 on free coffees, pastries, and other food to accompany lunch meetings in four years without a competitive tender.
The Dublin Dental University Hospital spent €161,202 in a four-year period up to November 2024 purchasing food from six local coffee shops and eateries for employees attending meetings.
Services availed of included artisan teas and coffees, fruit, pastries, milk, and hot and cold food, with employees in attendance routinely ordering personalised sandwiches in advance.
At an average of more than €40,000 spent a year, the spending should have been subject to a public tender under EU spending rules for public contracts of greater value than €25,000.
A spokesperson for the dental hospital said it had engaged with the Office of Government Procurement with regard to catering and found the OGP’s funding framework “is more suitable for organisations that have on-site catering” such as a canteen.
“DDUH consider current levels of expenditure on catering as appropriate,” they said.
The dental hospital, which hosts Trinity College Dublin’s dental school at its south Dublin city centre location and is funded by the HSE, has been the focus of a number of reviews of its procurement over the past two years by different groupings, including professional services firm Mazars, which concluded only "limited assurance" could be given regarding the adequacy of the institution’s purchasing governance.
According to the hospital’s published accounts, its non-compliant procurement officially increased from €463,000 in 2021 to €773,776 in 2023, representing 12.6% of its total annual expenditure of €6.1m.
In its 2023 review of the institution, Mazars noted for more than a quarter of the suppliers looked at there was no supporting documentation, while sources familiar with that review have speculated as much as 75% of purchasing at the hospital could be non-compliant with the State’s spending rules for public money.
For one supplier, Neil Martin Construction, with whom the hospital spent more than €1.3m in 2023, Mazars was not provided with the contract put in place between the two parties.
Mazars made seven recommendations for the reform of the hospital’s procurement processes, including that all spending be tracked and documentation for every transaction retained, while suppliers with whom money was spent outside of public procurement rules should not be reused unless the correct procedures were followed.
A follow-up audit in 2024 showed that of those seven recommendations, none had been fully implemented.
One recommendation, which called for all procurement processes to be documented, had not been implemented in any way, with Mazars noting there was “no evidence” details of spending and potential procurement breaches had been reported to the audit and risk committee at any time in the first six months of 2024.
In response to Mazars’ updated findings, hospital management noted “procurement compliance has been set as a high priority item for DDUH for the remainder of 2024 and into 2025”.