Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is exactly my point. The Department has notified us of allowances that amount to a few euro a day. My opening remark was about travel allowances paid by the month or the quarter to, I suspect, every area engineer and road supervisor in the country. They are entitled to them and the allowance probably represents good value. It must amount to a large sum of money. The Department has given information about kennel allowances but no information about fixed travel allowances for area engineers. There must be more than 100 area engineers in Ireland and I am sure they receive a few thousand euro a year. The area engineer who is not travelling is not much of an area engineer. More substantial sums of money are paid through the allowances about which we have not heard, relative to the sums of money about which we have heard.

I referred to a point that haunted the HSE and this committee a number of years ago. In the health services, the HSE had a computerised payroll system called PPARS. A fortune was spent on it and it was rolled out through a number of regions. What bedevilled the system was that some 2,800 payment methods were used in the health services. Rather than rationalise them, the HSE attempted to computerise the payment methods and it was a mess. The HSE started with a mess, computerised the mess and ended with a computerised mess. It should have tried to rationalise and streamline the payments and then computerise a simple system. As part of shared services of public service reform, we are in the process of organisations bidding, through various local authorities, on a number of contracts such as waste management licences, the collection of fees, human resources, procurement and purchases. I am worried about where this will end up. The unfortunate successful local authority, which must centralise payroll for all local authorities, may get a shock upon seeing hundreds of different items that are under the radar that have not come to the committee's attention and have not come to light. It might end up being a much larger problem. This is similar to other areas in which we have tried to centralise systems, such as student grants and medical cards. I am afraid we are heading down the same road when we do not have an exact fix on the matter. Every allowance sent to the Department will end up on someone's payslip at the end of the fortnight and we must be exact on these types of arrangements. The committee does not yet have a handle on the matter, with 160 allowances outstanding. I have seen other Departments centralising matters and problems emerge. The problem could arise if people do not know about the 160 allowances as it is not contained in the brief they see at the beginning. I sound a note of caution. I wish the Department success in its projects but some may be more complicated. I look forward to receiving information on some of those allowances to which we referred in the list of 160 allowances.