The Health Service Executive placed substantial ventilator orders with seven intermediary companies that had little or no experience in the supply of the devices and with whom they had not previously done business, the Comptroller and Auditor General has told the Public Accounts Committee.
Seamus McCarthy told committee that his examination found no due diligence checks had been completed on four of the new suppliers, while the extent of checks varied for the other six.
The checks that were undertaken flagged significant financial and quality risks with using these suppliers, but the HSE perceived that its need for ventilators outweighed the risks and made advance payments totalling €81 million to the new suppliers.
The HSE has more than 100 ventilators bought from new suppliers during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, which are in storage and not suitable for clinical use, the committee heard.
A further 365 ventilators worth €6.6m were donated to India.
The head of the HSE Bernard Gloster told the PAC today that assessing requirements for ventilators was an impossible task with no realistic predictability models in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
He told the committee that staff involved at the time had to deliberately "over order" to try and secure necessary volume of supply, knowing that cancelling later and managing the financial risk would be factors that might arise.
The committee heard that of the orders made, the HSE is seeking to recover over €22m and over €6m of ventilators were donated to India.
The HSE stopped ordering ventilators on 20 April 2020.
Mr McCarthy told the committee today on its resumed hearing into the controversy, that over a four-week period spanning March and April 2020, the HSE placed orders for a total of almost 3,500 ventilators at an agreed cost of €129 million.
He said this was almost twice the number of devices that the HSE had been sanctioned to purchase and was over ten times the number of additional ventilators that could be clinically used.
Mr McCarthy said that unit prices for the devices were escalating rapidly as many health authorities were scrambling for supplies.
He told the committee that subsequently, the HSE cancelled many of the orders that had been placed and received refunds of €50.5m.
"No benefit or value has been received by the HSE for expenditure totalling €30.5 million," he said.
"At the time of reporting, the HSE was continuing to pursue refunds of €22.3 million and regarded €8.1 million as unrecoverable," he added.
The C&AG said previously the HSE had write-offs of stocks of PPE and hand gel totalling almost €483m, due to unsuitability of purchased items, obsolescence or price fluctuations.
