Dublin Funds Industry Denies Staffing Crisis

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

14 June 2005

The Dublin Funds Industry Association has refuted suggestions that a lack of qualified staff in the Irish capital's hedge fund administration industry is leading to the mis-pricing of securities and threatening the stability of Ireland's financial system.

The Financial Times reported last week that firms based in Dublin are facing difficulties in recruiting and retaining adequately trained staff and, as a result, errors are occurring in the pricing of certain complex financial instruments such as credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations which cannot be priced by conventional Bloomberg or Reuters systems.

While conceding that the funds industry was having to venture beyond Dublin to cities such as Cork and Wexford to fulfil recruitment needs, Gary Palmer, the chief executive of the DFIA, rejected the suggestion that that there is a staffing problem in the Irish fund administration industry.

“It’s an industry that had peak annual growth of 100% in 1999 and 2000 when the country was near to full employment and it was able to attract sufficient resources then. The industry is well prepared to meet the challenges of recruiting staff," Mr Palmer stated in an article published in the Sunday Times. He added that hedge fund assets under administration in Ireland grew by 40% in the year to the end of 2004.

According to the Finance Dublin Yearbook 2005, total employment in the core sectors of banking, funds and insurance increased by 7% in the year from 2003 to 2004, reaching 17,610.

Banking led the growth in new employment, with 6,781 now working in the sector, up 9% from 2003 levels. The funds sector also saw substantial growth last year, with 541 new jobs being created during the period. This took the total numbers working in the area to 8,017, an increase of 7.2%. An estimated 2,000 people are employed in hedge fund administration in Ireland, servicing 2,112 Irish and non-Irish domiciled hedge funds.

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